[I was asked to respond to a paper from the upcoming Society for Pentecostal Studies/Wesleyan Theological Society conference and thought I’d post an edited version here. The paper, by Thomas Bridges, engages Rodney Stark’s book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success.] I’m sorry that I’m unable to be…
One of the courses I’m teaching here in York is a delightful but admittedly idiosyncratic one entitled ‘Victorian Britain and Postmodern Culture: Contemporary Medievalisms.’ (The unofficial title is ‘everything Jamie loves about 19th-century England.’) One of the key figures who keeps confronting us is John Ruskin, whose own Fors Clavigera is the namesake for this…
One often finds the talking heads on the BBC and op-eds in various papers referring to the “sharia row” as another indication of Rowan Williams’ “liberal” tendencies (surely one of the slipperiest and equivocal epithets we have in religious circles). But if one actually attends to his argument–and his corpus–I think one finds that Williams’…
The furor over Archbiship Rowan William’s lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice has been fanned to the point of hysteria by a reactionary media and government. Some have even called for him to resign. Williams clearly underestimated what sort of beast “public perception” can be. A few follow-up reflections: 1. The Archbishop has offered…
Things can get ugly when high-powered academic distinctions spill out from the faculty common room onto the pavement—or more particularly, when nuanced, complex, and erudite theological treatises are trimmed to bits and soundbites digestible by the frantic pace of the 24-hour news cycle. Pope Benedict XVI learned this lesson the hard way last year in…
Despite all the talk of the United States as the latest stand-in for “empire,” a fascinating article by Parag Khanna in this weekend’s Guardian suggests that in fact it is Europe which has been slyly, quietly building an empire that is not only economic but territorial. In “The Empire Strikes Back,” a snippet from his…