Last night my boys and I watched the Wachowski brothers’ latest offering, Speed Racer. I quite enjoyed their (perhaps indulgent?) visual forays, variously hovering between surreal and camp. (I confess to also kind of enjoying the cheap chimpanzee comedy shtick.) But I also found myself strangely intrigued by a melodramatic, almost cliche line uttered by…
Some Fors Clavigera readers might be interested in a new book that has just appeared from Wipf & Stock: The Logic of Incarnation: James K.A. Smith’s Critique of Postmodern Religion, edited by Neal DeRoo and Brian Lightbody. This grew out of a conference that engaged my work at Brock University in St. Catherine’s, Ontario. Drawing…
I usually enjoy the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, the yearly gathering of scholars in religious studies and theology. But this year I found it a slog. I’m not sure if this is a reflection of the meeting or of my own personal ambivalence about the very project. But the drone of…
I have been hoping for several years to develop a course that I’d love to teach at Calvin–on marriage, family, and sex from a philosophical and theological perspective (drawing on Aristotle, Aquinas, Hauerwas, David Matzko McCarthy, and others), but also utilizing literary and poetic sources. I think it will be a hard sell for me…
A little tidbit from Steve Coll’s New Yorker piece, “Overtaxed,” reflecting on Joe the Plumber and the specter of socialism: The principle that Obama evinced, which most economists would regard as unexceptionable, can be traced to Adam Smith. In “The Wealth of Nations” (1776), his seminal treatise on capitalism, Smith wrote: The necessaries of life…
I’ve received a few questions and some criticism regarding my previous post on “Just Charity.” Admittedly, within the 500 words of a newspaper column, it’s difficult to be nuanced. So let me follow up here by responding to two sorts of questions. Objection 1: Your reading of Acts 5 seems to miss two crucial points:…