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Showing posts from January, 2019

Heschel book un-"box"-ing

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Hi all, It's been hard to produce much content lately, so I made a short video to talk with you about some of the books I'm engaging with this semester. Enjoy! ================================== Follow @WTravisMcMaken Subscribe to Die Evangelischen Theologen

Brief Book Note: Peter Brown’s “Ransom of the Soul”

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I’ve wanted to read this book since it was first published in 2015. And I’ve had the paperback version on pre-order for a while. So I was thrilled when I got the notification that it had shipped, and knew that I would be able to put it at the top of my “books that I hope to read this summer” pile. Peter Brown, The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity (Harvard, 2018). Now, you might find it odd, gentle reader, that I would be so interested in a book on the afterlife since I recently commented in another post that “It may be that death is a site of encounter with God. Beyond that, there isn't much one can say.” It’s the intersection of wealth with afterlife that made me curious. Here’s how I would summarize the question answered in this book: How did Christianity in the first half-millennium leverage its vision of the afterlife in order to discipline wealth? Brown answers that question, as we’ve come to expect from him, in exciting detail,

So, You Want to Read Wolfhart Pannenberg? A guest post by Andrew Hollingsworth

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[Ed. Note: Andrew Hollingsworth, PhD, is an adjunct professor of theology at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He tweets: @andrewh_mc11 . He writes at Theology and Stuff , and Trinityhaus .] So you want to read Wolfhart Pannenberg? Great! Why, you ask? I’ll tell you. Wolfhart Pannenberg was one of the most important theologians in Germany (and the world!) in the 20th century. Several theologians, such as Philip Clayton, Ted Peters, and Fred Sanders have noted in their obituaries for him that the world lost a theological giant on September 4, 2014. His three-volume Systematic Theology , though not as many volumes as Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics , is one of the most significant contributions to the field, having one of the vastest scopes and one of the most ambitious aims of any before it. Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology is perhaps the most interdisciplinary one written to date. He is well known for a statement he made in an interview once: “Because God is the creator of eve