modern.gods

Christian leadership is a popular topic today. While Jesus and the Bible definitely spoke about those in political authority in their time, we do not often limit the term today to refer to those in office. Where do we find the concept of a Christian leader in the life of Christ and the early church? What is significant about "leading"? Is it a core Biblical concept, or is it merely a baptism of the modern love of effectiveness and managerial prowess? To find what is meant today by Christian leadership, we must first ask to whom and in what situation this term is  directed. Those most often termed "Christian leaders" or seen as in need of leadership training tend to fall into three types, sometimes overlapping, each with a corresponding leadership "axis": the pastor as leader of their church, the influential businessperson as leader in their business relations, and more generally the Christian as a leader in their relationships with neighbors. The Bible...

"According to Nussbaum, the attempt to secure social cooperation on the basis of mutual advantage for the contracting parties is at the heart of liberal political theory.... Liberalism teaches us to provide an account of justice that does not depend on the presumption of altruism, but rather assumes an admittedly fictive bargaining process that establishes fundamental principles of mutual advantage. The presumption is that people will do the right things if they can see that it really is in their best interest." (85) Hauerwas's critique of liberal political theory hinges on his theological anthropology. LPT assumes a society composed of autonomous rational actors, independent of and prior to any determinative tradition, seeking after their own self-interest, as necessary for an account of justice distributed to the members of said society . (...) Despite such strong critiques of LPT on a person/society scale, LPT is still the dominant mode of thought on a nation-s...

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One of the primary difficulties with trying to establish the "New Testament vision" or the "Scriptural vision" of the kingdom of God (or a variety of other topics) is the authors of the bible were not modern academics. Now I know that is quite obvious, but we must realize the implications of that, particularly with regards to our practice of "clearly defining our terms". Near-mathematical clarity is a primary virtue, especially in the field of systematic theology. But the NT writers were not systematicians, and so we cannot discount the possibility that at one point in the NT the phrase "kingdom of God" means one thing, and at another point it means something rather different. But would this imply that the NT writers are wrong at some places, that there actually is a single description of the kingdom of God and that they muddle it at some points? And here we find ourselves back in a systematic mode of thinking. It is not a question of the er...

There was a movie that came out a few years ago called "The Last Samurai" about Tom Cruise being brought into the last remaining samurai clan in Japan.  Many critics saw it as just a rip-off of "Dances with Wolves", which it was, but there was also there was this underlying theme of the Japanese concept of beauty, mono no aware .  Ken Watanabe, the head of the clan, explained this concept to Tom Cruise while describing the blossoms of a cherry tree.  They are beautiful because they only bloom once a year for a short while and then die.  If you tried to artificially maintain them you would take away what makes them beautiful, their life and their ephemerality. In the movie, the cherry tree was a metaphor for the beautiful and simple family clan that was dying away in the face of modernity.  But this metaphor underlies a more general concept of beauty.  The tragedy of beauty is not that it will one day fade away, but that this transcience and fragility is part of the ...

Since returning to the States, I've looked over my blog site and discovered a draft that I never finished, began just over a year ago. It seemed like an interesting topic, so I decided to revive it. I had a short conversation recently (that is, over a year ago) with some friends about logic and about where it is 'located', in the world, in our minds, or maybe just in the minds of a particular class of educated Western males. Now of course I was was the one to suggest the possibility of the later (not that I even hold it to be true, although some feminist thinkers, such as Andrea Nye, in fact, do) and was immediately harangued for it. It was as if calling someone illogical implied they were irrational! Now logic, particularly symbolic logic, is a field that has been developed primarily by Western males. But it also claims a universal and atemporal status over everything that could be considered true.  The Logical Positivists even claimed that if you couldn't think about ...

So I was reading MacIntyre on incommensurability and untranslatability, summed up: "Where two large-scale systems of thought and practice are in radical disagreement...there is and can be no independent standard or measure by appeal to which their rival claims can adjucated, since each has internal to itself its own fundamental standard of judgment. Such systems are incommensurable, and the terms in and by means of which judgment is delivered in each are so specific and idiosyncratic to each that they cannot be translated into the terms of the other without gross distortion." One need look no further than the U.S.'s politics in the Mid-East to see the ramifications if this were even potentially the case. Even with a likelihood of incommensurability being total, and no possibility of debate succesfully crossing the systems in any meaningful way, we must continue as if this were possible. We must act on the potential that there is something constructive to be gained, bec...