Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

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…or, Something to keep you busy over the weekend…

…or, The Past Fortnight in the Theoblogosphere.

July begins to slip past more quickly than I should like and I keep hoping that I’ll wake up with the extraordinary power to freeze the world around me while I go about my work for a few months – then, perhaps, I would actually get some things done! But, alas, such powers have not (yet) been granted to me. In the meantime, here are some links to good reading so that you can stay as busy as I am…

  • To begin, here is a nice official press release from PTS about the recent Barth conference. It comes complete with a picture of many of the speakers.
  • The folks over at the blog run by a number of Wheaton PhD students provides a list of links to where you can currently purchase a number of texts by and about Barth at deep discount. Hurry over and fill out your library a bit before the deals end!
  • Many folks who take a, let us say, less hermeneutical approach to the biblical text also venerate John Calvin (for those of you slow on the uptake, I’m talking about all those crazy Reformed folk who are always making noise…). Well, here are some links that make that connection problematic, i.e., here are some links showing that Calvin was a more subtle reader of scripture ~500 years ago than many of these folks are today: on the Sermon on the Mount as a rhetorical construct, on the creation narrative, on the authenticity of 2nd Peter.
  • Friend of the blog and former KBBC contributor Andy Rowell enlists Douglass Campbell to get at the soteriological heart of the debate between Barth and Brunner in this recent post.
  • More from the folks over at that Wheaton blog. This time, Jordan Barrett provides a review of the new edition of Barth’s The Word of God and Theology.
  • Collin Cornell, one of my favorite newer theo-bloggers, is reading some Marx! It warms the heart . . .
  • Religion Dispatches has a post up dealing with David Barton, one of the guys responsible for the conservative rhetoric about America’s “Christian” foundation. Reading this will (unfortunately) help you to better understand the current political landscape.
  • Well, it was only a matter of time before I warmed once again to the topic of current events within Roman Catholicism. I’ve been on about this for a while, especially in this post but also in these fortnightly link roundups since then. In a Religion Dispatches piece entitled Notify This!, we get a delightful collection of brilliant one-liners (discussing how long it took for the CDF to issue this censure, we get the deadpan line: “A first-year graduate student could have handled the analysis in a week.”) sprinkled over analysis of the CDF’s censure of Margaret A. Farley’s work. But here is the hard core:
    “The Roman men are hell-bent on reining in American nuns, if only to prove that they can rein in somebody in a world that pays them increasingly little heed. They fear that such intellectually powerful and theologically persuasive women, who identify with the institutional Roman Catholic Church through their membership in canonical communities, will trump them in the public arena”
  • Not to be left out, the WIT blog reflects on just how much like the apostle Peter the Catholic hierarchy is currently behaving:
    “perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when Peter’s successor–I’m thinking of both the Pope and the Vatican–acts in a very “Petrine” way: (1) Recognizes that Jesus is the Christ. (2) Refuses to identify with those who suffer, even though that’s where Christ is found. (3) Gets offended when accused of not loving Christ.”
  • The WIT blog continues on the topic with a piece entitled A Church That Changes. This is an incredibly helpful post. The argument here is twofold: (1) the RC church does change, no matter what they tell you; (2) that change has not historically come from the top.
  • Finally, to conclude on this subject for the present, I offer you Stephen Colbert interviewing one of the censured nuns.
  • Kim Fabricius is brings us another set of doodlings. Do I sense another book in the works for Kim? Here’s a taste: “Rowan Williams is a theological multiplier, not simplifier. That’s why he has a beard: he eschews Occam’s razor.”
  • Bobby Grow’s book is out!
  • Finally, I leave you with a sermon from good friend of the blog Jason Ingalls. The sermon is entitled Jesus Starts a New Family, and takes Mark 3.19-35 as its text.

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Comments

Bobby Grow said…
Thank you, Travis :).
July 07, 2012 12:35 PM
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