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Join me for a conversation with Dr. Ash Cocksworth ( Twitter , University of Roehampton ) as we talk about our recently released co-edited volume, Karl Barth: Spiritual Writings , in the Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality series. During this conversation we talk about how Ash and I got to know each other and came to work together on this volume, what our favorite things about the book are, who should read the book, how politics relates to spirituality, and much more. Marmite even comes up at one point and a brilliant bit of wordplay by yours truly falls totally flat. It was a fun conversation. Ash and I were joined by my friend Dr. Kate Hanch ( Twitter , First St. Charles United Methodist Church ), who functioned as our special guest host and moderator for the conversation. Once you’ve ordered your copy of Karl Barth: Spiritual Writings , head over to Fortress Press to pre-order Kate’s forthcoming book, Storied Witness: The Theology of Black Women Preachers in 19th-Cen...

I'm starting to tackly Gary Dorrien's 500+ page tome, Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism (Yale, 2019) and I must say that he's doing a good job front-loading some interesting stuff to motivate his easily distracable readers (like myself) to stick with it. What follows is an excerpt wherein Dorrien reflects on Karl Marx's mixed legacy for democratic socialism. It reonates with me because Helmut Gollwitzer made a distinction between Marxism as an analytical tool and 'dogmatic Marxism' as an ideology, and I think that distinction in how Marx has been applied tracks with Dorrien's comments here. If you want more on Gollwitzer and Marxism, you could do worse than by starting here . But enough of that. On to the excerpt! No definition of socialism as economic collectivism or state control of the economy or any particular ownership scheme is common to the many traditions of socialist thought. Various schools...

Pekka Järveläinen, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons In a recent post , I explored William Stringfellow’s ambivalence about the legal profession and, more specifically, toward ideological frameworks (e.g., natural law theory) that obscure the ways law is actually practiced. To reiterate briefly: The legal guild (like all institutions) is a fallen principality subsisting within a complex web of systems; like all the powers that be, the legal profession is enthralled to the power of death and fails in its vocation of promoting human flourishing. Moreover, rather than clarifying this situation, abstract theories (such as natural law theory) tend to mythologize the workings of law in concrete circumstances. All that said, though, there remains another side of Stringfellow’s perspective on the legal profession – a viewpoint more positive and potentially constructive, even if the compliment is delivered rather backhandedly. Some background might be helpful: Stringfellow does not under...

I'm sorry to say, gentle readers, that I have been a bit remiss of late in not making this announcement sooner. The word has gone out via some other avenues before now, but that is no excuse. Regardless, it gives me distinct pleasure to share with you that a volume that Ash Cocksworth and I have been working on for some time is now available: Karl Barth: Spiritual Writings , Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2022). As I noted, Ash and I have been at work on this volume for some time. A quick search of my email records traces our collaboration back to April of 2017, but - honestly - I think we started up before that. The manuscript has been done for a little while as well, and we had to wait out some production delays. But now the finished product is in our hands. And it can be in your hands as well, should you wish. Or in your e-bok reader of choice. Entirely up to you. The volume contains a foreword by George Hunsinger , a ~40-page introductory e...