DET

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...

…or, Something to keep you busy over the weekend… …or, The Past Fortnight in the Theoblogosphere. Well, the last link post was well over a month ago. DET went on hiatus for the holidays and one thing lead to another. But now we’re back. And even though we’ve only been back for the past week, I wanted to get a link post out there to catch you up on anything you might have missed while we were on hiatus. That’s right! Just because DET wasn’t posting doesn’t mean I stopped collecting links. And not I’ve got a deep backlog just begging to get cleared out a bit. So, enjoy! Here are the DET post from the past week: Top Ten DET Post of 2016 All on Our Own: Yet More from Barth at Bremen And here’s good stuff from elsewhere: Thank you, Trump voters, for this wonderful joke Why Time’s Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art Empire of Tolerance (Genghis Khan and the Quest for God) On the fallacy of ‘Christian marriage’ Trump’s Second Gilded Age: Overcoming the Rule of...

But the boat was now in the middle of the sea,[a] tossed by the waves, for the wind was contrary (Matt. 14:24). Christ in the Storm on the Lake of Galilee by Rembrandt. (Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)   The Word in this World: Two Sermons by Karl Barth, trans. Chrisopher Asprey, ed. Kurt I. Johanson (Regent College, 2007). Fürchte Dich nicht! Predigten aus den Jahren 1934 bis 1948 (Munich, Germany: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1949), pp. 18-31) I was once touring the nave of a lovely Episcopal parish. The tour guide pointed to the rafters and noted how they resembled the inverted hull of a ship. With a whiff of pride, as it seemed to me -- though he was not, in my experience, an arrogant person -- he suggested this structure symbolized the church as a ship sheltering it's passengers from the chaos of the outside world. Karl Barth, I'm convinced, would have none of this. As Barth marches through the text and the exposition in his Bremen sermon, he explores the profou...

That’s right – it’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for, gentle readers: DET is back for 2017! Stay tuned for all the fun, thoughtful, and sometimes dorky (let’s not deny it…) posts to come over the next year. And to kick it all off, let’s revisit 2016 and see what posts y’all were reading the most. Long-time readers know that we do this every year, and I encourage you to check out last year’s post (and fall down the rabbit hole of links into bygone ages). This year I’m going to do a Top 10 based on traffic, a few honorable mentions that were knocking on the top 10 traffic list door, and another set of honorable mentions of posts that . . . well . . . I happened to like for one reason or another. #1 has the most traffic and #10 the least. Here we go! DET 2016 Top 10 So, You Want To Read Karl Barth? - This one is usually on the list in some capacity. It’s a classic, and (I like to think that it) has helped crowds of people to make a start with Barth. Eschew imitations – thi...