Finding a better story 3

In the last post in the series, I posted some general observations about the cultural context in which the Genesis 1 creation was composed. I contend that the Biblical creation story, as well as other parts of the primordial history (Genesis 1-11) were written to challenge the literary-symbolic world of the Ancient Near East, in [...]

Finding a better story 2

Since I have this unfortunate tendency to start a series and then never finish it, I’m not going to make any promises about how long this will go, how many installments it will have, or even if it will be all that coherent. However, I went back and re-read my “Finding a better story” entry [...]

Finding a better story

The dominant modes of social, political, and economic discourse in our day may be fragmented, they may seem without coherence, and they may be characterized more by argument than agreement. Indeed, I think even a cursory survey of the ongoing public discussions reveals this to be true. The landscape of public discourse over pretty much [...]

Cornerstone seminar

The Cornerstone seminar went really well. The title of my session was “Sacred Anarchy: The Image of God and Political (Dis)Order”. I focused on Wink’s formulation of the Myth of Redemptive Violence, focused on Genesis as subversive to the Myth, and then took a trip through modern political philosophy to demonstrate how the modern state [...]

New article at Catapult

This morning the new issue of Catapult Magazine went live today, including my article “(In)Security and the Fall“.
I briefly re-viewed Eve Ensler’s excellent book Insecure at Last, casting her concern about security and the strange phenomenon of how cultures that focus strongly on security tend to be fundamentally insecure in light of the Biblical story [...]

misc.

The Jesus Radicals conference went very well. If you weren’t able to attend, there will be CDs available of the sessions for a very reasonable price, so check back here and I’ll let you know when they’re available – or, better yet, you could join the discussion on the forums and find out first-hand!
I have [...]

An actual conversation I had the other day

Me: (sitting at a picnic table in the sun reading Dale Brown’s Biblical Pacifism)
He: Pacifist? You’re a pacifist? At a Christian music festival? (we were at Cornerstone)
Me: Yes, for the first 300 years of the church’s existence they were very nearly universally committed to nonviolence and opposed to Christians participating in the military.
He: How can [...]

a summary of Christian anarchy

I posted this on an anarchist discussion group a short while ago, and thought it was worth sharing here.
I may be a bit of an oddball, because I actually came to my anarchist views through my religious studies.
I have written somewhat more about my views on my blog, http://propheticheretic.wordpress.com (though I’ve neglected it as of [...]

Ansell article

Absolution Revolution has moved! You can read this article at http://absolutionrevolution.com/blog/2007/02/18/ansell-article/

The Liberating Image: Imago Dei in Genesis 1 by J. Richard Middleton

Absolution Revolution has moved! You can read this article at http://absolutionrevolution.com/blog/2007/02/17/the-liberating-image-imago-dei-in-genesis-1-by-j-richard-middleton/

battle of the sexes and creation

Absolution Revolution has moved! You can read this article at http://absolutionrevolution.com/blog/2006/10/04/battle-of-the-sexes-and-creation/

Nieztsche, the fall, anarcho-primitivism, and human domination

Absolution Revolution has moved! You can see this article at http://absolutionrevolution.com/blog/2006/10/03/nieztsche-the-fall-anarcho-primitivism-and-human-domination/