Liturgy · Laughter · Camaraderie · Contemplation
Here’s what we have seen thus far in our series on a theopoetics of Exile: All humans feel an innate lack or void within ourselves. The serpent suggested to Eve in the Garden — and evangelicalism echoes this sentiment — that this sense of emptiness and incompleteness is not natural but foreign, and must be overcome by […]
In this series we have seen that Jesus, by his anguished cry from the cross (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”), utterly and completely subverted the American Gospel which promises that we can avoid the void if we just do X, Y, or Z. Rather than seeking to circumvent the darkness, Jesus plunged himself […]
We are at the point in our series where we are considering the “death of God,” and I would be remiss if we didn’t pause and reflect upon Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s remarks on what he called “Christianity come of age.” In a letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge written from prison on April 30, 1944, Bonhoeffer […]
We have seen thus far in this series that we as humans sense within ourselves a lack or a void, and further, that this void is intrinsic to the nature of reality itself. The idea, then (so prominent in Christian circles), that this sense of incompleteness is some unnatural intruder that can be overcome if we do […]
In my last two posts I have discussed the lack, or void, that seems to be intrinsic to the human experience. As I have suggested, the way we often deal with this sense of emptiness is to insist that it is an unnatural intruder that must be overcome, and further, the Christian solution is to […]
In our last article we considered the fact that we as humans feel within ourselves a lack or a void that we want to overcome. We often look to some “sacred object” that, if attained, will give us the sense of fulfillment we crave. We desperately want to avoid the void. Consider the words of […]