DET (Die Evangelischen Theologen) is the theological version of a digital news magazine. The DET authorial team provides insightful, thought-provoking content on a wide range of theological, religious, and even political subjects from current events and culture as well as from the Christian and other religious traditions.
*stage whisper from Scott in the wings* “Who cares? Just get on with it, already.”
*clears throat*
Welcome to 2018, folks! DET is awakening from its holiday slumber, and we’re looking forward to another great year of blogging! What will that year hold? What exciting new highs or lows with DET achieve? Only time will tell!
One thing I do want to apprise you of, gentle readers, is that Scott and I are a little uncertain about this year. It has become increasingly difficult for us to keep up our usual posting pace as other demands mercilessly encroach upon our time. So, sadly, I must tell you that DET blogging this year is likely to be much more of an ad hoc sort of thing.
But, we’re not dead yet (*chuckles*), so make sure you’re subscribed whether through email or in some other way (like Facebook), follow us on Twitter (WTM / Scott / DET contributor’s list) if you want to hang out in between blog posts, as it were, and consider submitting a guest contribution. In the meantime, here are some things that we DET folk have been up to since you last heard from us.
Third, speaking of Richard, he also included my book in his recap list, Good Reads: 2017. This guy has good taste in books.
Fourth, I appeared on episode 133 of the Thinking Religion podcast, along with some friends from the interwebs (click the podcast link to get the first cast list). It was fun, and I even got to talk about Gollwitzer a bit at the very end! More importantly, though, I got to wisecrack through the whole thing so…you probably want to just skip to the bit at the end. We’ll see if they invite me back.
Fifth, my Lindenwood colleague, Nichole Torbitzky, and I filmed and posted another installment on our series exploring process theology and Barthian theology together. Click below to watch!
Sixth and finally, you may have missed it but DET awoke briefly from its holiday slumber to offer you an advent reflection from our own Alex DeMarco. It’s never too late or too early for a good advent reflection, so here you go: Looking Back to See Ahead: An Advent Reflection .
Ok, that should have you all caught up on DET goings-on. Now, here’s the list of links from around the interwebs that you’ve been waiting for!
I was kickin' it on Twitter last Wednesday night while doing some grading and then some editing, and I caught a Twitter essay from Christopher Stroop in my feed that leaped off the screen at me. It pulls together a number of issues that have been bouncing around in my head, many of which I fit in the title. Stroop's reflections merge political and psychological analysis, and helps us understand how there could have been "good Germans" and how we might end op with "good Americans." Let us hope that we do not, and work to make that hope a reality.
Anyway, I wanted to share this Twitter essay with you, gentle readers, because there are enough people who read DET or follow me and DET on social media who are within or close to evangelicalism and will be aided by this analysis. Stroop was gracious enough to allow me to collect his tweets and make them available. If you've made your way here on a mobile device, however, you would probably prefer to read this …
This was a very personal book to write, and it has become even more personal to me in the months since publication. The book cost me my job, forced my family to relocate, and has been the cause of great, enduring pain. In a way, the book’s theme of cocrucifixion and existential abandonment has become more real to me since writing it. But I do not regret a single word. It was something I had to write; the words were almost drawn out of me, as if I were more their amanuensis than author.
Roberts suggests that TGWS might have been a kin to the book that Dietrich Bonhoeffer proposed writing at the end of his life. This observation means more to me than Roberts could have realized, for it was reading Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers in Priso…
Note from the editor: Gentle readers, some of you may be old enough to remember what a transom is. For those of you who are not, it is a window above a door (pictured) that one could leave open--even while closing the door--to encourage air circulation inside a building back before the advent multi-million dollar HVAC systems. Editors used to occasionally enter their offices and glance at the floor to find that some authorial hopeful had pushed a manuscript over the transom. Well, the electronic version of such a thing happened to me with the below post. It was submitted anonymously for reasons that will become obvious when you read it. What we have here is an account of coming to a personal theological reckoning with dialectical theology. I have decided to publish it in accordance with the author's wishes in the hopes that it will encourage others of you who may be in similar situations. The author has greater facility with classical Greek than do I; I have discerned that this pi…
There is a scene in the film adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Two Towers (it plays out a little differently in the book) where Treebeard – an Ent – shares an exchange with Merry – one of the Hobbits (if you don’t know what Ents and Hobbits are then you are beyond my sympathy).
Treebeard, having decided along with the other Ents to forgo the ongoing war of the ring, tells Merry:
Treebeard: “We Ents cannot hold back this storm. We must weather such things as we have always done.”
Merry: “How can that be your decision?”
Treebeard: “This is not our war.”
The sort of detachment latent in Treebeard’s response reminds me, a white, cis-het male, of the same sort of privilege that I am afforded in relation to the recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, and much more so the centuries of systemic oppression that preceded those vile demonstrations. As someone born into an advantageous position in relation to western culture’s pre-existing power structures, my response to thi…
Reading David W. Congdon’s The God Who Saves (TGWS) is truly an unsettling event. At least it was for me. It forced me to check my presuppositions and rethink my beliefs concerning, among other things, eschatology, apocalyptic, and how they are connected to traditional Christian notions of the afterlife.
I have read and reread TGWS numerous times. I was one of the first readers to review it on Amazon, and I have convinced many people to buy the book for themselves--or at least it to bump it up on their reading lists.
Just what is it about this book that has caused me to so enthusiastically recommend it every chance I get? I’m glad you asked! The reasons are numerous, obviously. In fact, on the first few pages of my copy I have jotted down what I consider to be the forty most important passages in TGWS. These are numbered in order of appearance, not in terms of importance. The rest of this post will be mainly devoted to passage number nine in that list. To provide a w…
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