Subverting the rhetoric of American empire

Brandon Rhodes has written an EXCELLENT article at Jesus Manifesto called “Severing the Rhetorical Roots of the Empire“. In it he lists some quotes, inviting followers of Jesus to creatively rewrite them to displace idolatry and blasphemy with subversive truth, just as Paul and other early Christian authors rhetorically usurped Caesar’s place of privilege and [...]

musing about political terminology and misc.

Too often in our reading of the Bible, we make an easy association between words like “liberty”, “justice”, and other words that have political associations in our time, as well as words with other economic and social implications, and the usages of such words in modern liberalized political discourse. This error is often compounded by [...]

Language, embeddedness, and perspective/normativity

It’s really only recently, within the past couple of years or so, that I have begun really, seriously considering and reflecting on just how embedded I am in a world where white, male, straight, Anglo-European, blue collar middle-class, small town, and education level so define the way I see things, the way I speak of [...]

a brief on the nature and limits of counterculture

If you’ve read much on here, particularly in my pages (especially About, Anarchy, and Prophetic), you know I’m all about Christianity as counterculture. There are, I think, a number of good reasons for this, not the least of which are rooted in the early church practices and the teachings of Jesus and the apostles, but [...]

some thoughts on truth and religious epistemology

This is part of a discussion I’m having on a Facebook group, via the group’s wall, which only allows 1000 characters per post, so it’s not terribly well-developed, but I think it’s a decent framework for a beginning.
I have a lot of beginnings of ideas, if you hadn’t noticed.
The group is called “Post-Emerging [...]

another article from Brian Walsh and brief comment

Derrida and the Messiah
There is no truth without incarnation. Truth does not exist in a formless void, disembodied and apart from some kind of instantiation in concrete existence. While our ability to access truth objectively is cracked, flawed, that does not absolve us of the duty to pursue it.
Question to ponder… How does Jesus embody [...]

a brief on language and domination

Language tends to demonstrate the human tendency for domination in all things. Written language is probably stronger in this than spoken, but I would say language has a dominating tendency because when we speak we essentially make sounds (or write symbols that represent sounds) that have no meaning in and of themselves, but we (at [...]