Cross-posting from GoodReads: I have sort of read Joan Didion backwards, beginning with her masterful memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, and now working my way back to Slouching Towards Bethlehem–one of those books that casts a long shadow over contemporary nonfiction. I picked up this book as a companion for a recent trip back…
A friend who is a grad student in theology recently expressed some frustration with the proliferation of narrow “camps” in contemporary theology–and hence the lack of space for emerging theologians to engage in conversations which aren’t just predetermined at the outset. What s/he has found is that most theological claims/discussions are judged beforehand by a…
I’m continuing to enjoy Thomas Wolfe’s Letters. They hearken back to an epistolary age that is lost, when the letter had all the potential to be an essay, a short story, a travelogue, a memoir. Our emails will never be the same. Here are just a couple of snippets Wolfe wrote from Europe in 1928….
Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” could be co-opted as an interesting little parable for Christian theology and certain sensibilities within contemporary Christianity. The story centers around Gil Pender (played by Owen Wilson): a writer who’s sold his soul to Hollywood screenwriting but is now trying to realize his dream of being a “real” writer, that…
My summer-evening, front-porch reading for the past few days has been the Selected Letters of Thomas Wolfe, edited by his former agent, Elizabeth Nowell. They are charged with the same frenetic energy as his fiction. And given the range from his youth until just a couple of days before his untimely death, they also function…
On Pentecost Sunday, from my temporary rooms at Trinity College of the University of Toronto, I dispatched the manuscript for a second, revised edition of my first book, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic, which will be published by Baker Academic. As I note in the new Preface to the book,…