James K.A. Smith has become a thinker dear to my heart as someone with remarkable similarities to myself: someone fascinated with academics who has nonetheless been nourished by charismatic Christianity; who continually thinks and writes along the fuzzy boundaries between philosophy and theology; who also is engaged with issues pertaining to the urban built environment.
He recently […]
Archive for May, 2008
For a nice change of pace here, today’s sign that our society has devolved to the level of gibbering mush is the following warning on Smarties Peanut: “THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS PEANUTS.”
Holy crap! Peanuts in Smarties Peanut! Honestly. Should we even be protecting people who are too stupid to make this connection? Would it not be better […]
Now that I’ve praised part of the impulse lying behind the myth of primitive perfection (that we can be a “New Testament” church), it’s time to address some criticisms of this paradigm.
The first major criticism of this paradigm is that it assumes that the NT church was somehow perfect. It was not. It requires a good […]
In my last post, I outlined the typical evangelical narrative regarding their status as a “New Testament” church. These blessed and wise souls have somehow managed to transcend the past 2000 years or so and have landed themselves right back amongst the book of Acts! If you sense that I have some heavy critique of […]
I’ve been in and around Anabaptism and Evangelicalism for most of my life up and until this point, and I’m continually amazed by the amount of assumptions that I uncover. Today I’m going to tackle one such assumption that has only recently achieved the level of conscious recognition.
The typical story that is told in these types […]
Perhaps analogous to Thoreau’s adage that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” is something like “inner city-dwellers live in varying levels of constant fear.”
I say this as someone who recently moved to a pretty rough neighborhood in Winnipeg, where the fearful whispers of people who find out that we live in “that neighborhood” […]
