Dear Christian World, Deconstruction. ‘You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.’ httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk What it doesn’t mean It seems that Christians often use the word ‘deconstruction’ to describe an experience when assumptions and beliefs seem to come to pieces, where questioning and doubt become more natural than […]
Here it is. The big one – I know at least a few of you have been waiting to have a chance to read this, I hope you find it as interesting to read as it was to write. Despite the unassuming title, the subtitle gives away the potential controversy in the content of the […]
Semester 2 was a different beast to the first one. Two new modules, a new direction in the core and beginning to think about the dissertation (more of which later!) The core Wisdom module moved from the Old Testament to the New, then on to look at how Christian Wisdom is found in later years, […]
Evangelism has become a dirty word to some people and cultural changes are happening across the world, ones that I would normally label as ‘postmodern’, which raise new problems with how we share the Christian message. It’s these issues that Doug Pagitt tackles in his new book Evangelism in the Inventive Age. ‘Inventive Age’ is what […]
Transforming Contemporary Apologetics, though not a core module to the MA was taken by every student in my entry year. It had by far the heaviest reading load of any of the modules and it covered a lot of ground – taking in a range of apologetic techniques from across the centuries (but mainly Western), […]
Christian Wisdom and Transformation is the long title for the core module, which we all called Wisdom. The task over two terms was to explore Christian Wisdom, how it draws on the Old Testament and its potential for transforming Christians today. The first semester started by talking about what we might mean by ‘wisdom’ and where […]
I made the mistake of confusing Tim Ferriss with Timothy Ferriss, so I was surprised to be disappointed with an article on Wired, “Timothy Ferriss: The World of the Intellectual vs. The World of the Engineer”. I often read Tim’s blog, I’m fascinated by his approach to self-experimentation. So the over-simplification and scientism of the article surprised […]
Read the previous ‘Metanarratives’ posts: 1, 2. In my first post on metanarratives, I said that one of the defining features of postmodernity was the suspicion of metanarratives. What I never wrote about was why the postmodern is outright hostile to the giant stories. In a historical sense, it could be that postmodern philosophy was born from the […]
Read the previous ‘Metanarratives’ posts: 1, 2, 3 Previously I said that though postmoderns reject metanarratives (in favour of smaller, local narratives) on account of their violent totalizing, my view of scripture is that it does not have to be read as presenting that kind of metanarrative. Here’s why. We can discern two metanarratives woven […]
In my last post, I mentioned the story of Redemptive Violence as one of the dominant metanarratives that the media feed to us. I am sure you will recognise it when I describe it – it is the basis for every action movie ever! Whether the story takes place in history, in space, or in some […]