Inasmuch as the only way for readers to comment is in correspondence with me, Comments received in correspondence to me may be posted in part or in whole, and responded to on this weblog.
Inasmuch as the only way for readers to comment is in correspondence with me, Comments received in correspondence to me may be posted in part or in whole, and responded to on this weblog.
Every non-fundamentalist seminarian quickly learns
that among the principal challenges to theology in the modern world are
critical history, historical and cultural relativity, and religious pluralism.
The teachers don't say that as a general summary,
but that is the import of beginning Bible and theology.
My teachers were among the last students of the Neoorthodox;
the curriculum may have changed since the 1970s. I am out of touch.
The idea for the MTS thesis arose from a connection that came to me one day
in Edward Hobbs's Gospel of Mark course:
History, relativity, and pluralism are respectively species of
Exposure, Limitation, and Need.
Call them the three cardinal disappointments in life.
Edward (of blessed memory; he died in 2018)
had been at some pains to argue that in biblical religion
the world is affirmed as good, in full view of its pains.
Dealing with Exposure, Limitation, and Need
is the price to be paid (or task to be undertaken)
if one would participate in biblical religion of either variety.
(The rabbis handle these matters somewhat differently from
biblical religion of the Christian variety,
and those differences are for some other time.)
An exposition of the claims about Exposure, Limitation, and Need
can be found in
the Trinity paper,
"The Trinity and the Indo-European Tripartite Worldview."
Elementary Monotheism is available online, full text:
I. Exposure, Limitation, and Need
and
II. Action and Language in Historical Religion
Some basic Bible stuff
Recent Work: An introduction to
The Accountant's Tale and
Unanswerable Questions
Some (only a few) of the reasons why Christianity
has trouble in secular culture today (AT),
and beginning thoughts on how we relate to ultimate reality as personal (UAQ).
An approach to action starting from narrative
rather than from the idea of will- or intention-initiated motions.
First pages:
colophon, contents, intro, and first chapter
The Creationism book (2006):
Where, Now, O Biologists, Is Your Theory?
Intelligent Design as Naturalism By Other Means
Postscript to the creationism book:
From a perspective years afterward,
some of what I did not know when I wrote Where Now.
Much of it is in later books.
Older Books:
By the Waters of Naturalism
is online, full text
The web-page for the
Pacific Coast Theological Society
can be reached at
http://www.pcts.org;
some links to its entries are duplicated in pages within.
The campaign to legalize so-called "physician-assisted suicide" (PAS), or "Medical Aid in Dying" (MAiD) is perennial, and it is especially dangerous to people like me, the disabled. In the homicidal pity of some, we are thought to be especially suitable for PAS, MAiD, or just euthanasia.