Liturgy · Laughter · Camaraderie · Contemplation
Those who have been following my work will know that I have been highlighting the concept of “Exile” as a kind of catch-all category to describe ideas like divine weakness, folly, and (what Luther called) the theology of the cross. Further, I am placing Exile in contradistinction from “Empire,” which is the source of ideas […]
As we wrap up our Vatican’t series I’d like to explore a bit further something I alluded to in my last post. Speaking of the effects of the Jesus story upon humankind, I wrote: Or to put all this in (much) less orthodox terms, maybe there is no external divine Agent accomplishing any of this, […]
We have seen thus far in our Vatican’t series that with the death of Jesus came the death of an idolatrous and serpentine system according to which God is a kind of Genie in a bottle whose job is to provide us with the sense of wholeness and well-being that we lack. But if this […]
In our last post in this series we saw that Jesus, by his anguished cry of dereliction 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 […]
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 […]
Like most of us, I awoke this morning to the news that Anthony Bourdain had committed suicide. As I went on social media I began to see countless reactions to this tragedy from friends and acquaintances expressing shock, heartbreak, and condolences to the loved ones he left behind. But then I came across a Facebook […]