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Showing posts from March, 2019

Top 5 books of 2018

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I read a lot of books in 2018. Here are my top 5. The original tweet. Featured books: Taylor, From BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society Brown, Ransom of the Soul Pedersen, The Eternal Covenant ================================== Follow @WTravisMcMaken Subscribe to Die Evangelischen Theologen

Reflections on Schleiermacher's 5th Speech on Religion

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Friedrich Schleiermacher is awesome. Lots of folks love to hate him, but I'm here to tell you that you should read him. In this video, I discuss the 5th of Schleiermacher's speeches on Religion. I've re-purposed a recording that I made for a class that I no longer teach. I hope you find it helpful or at least entertaining. ================================== Follow @WTravisMcMaken Subscribe to Die Evangelischen Theologen

The McKrakenCast (Podcast)

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I'm sure that by now, DET readers are aware that I have a YouTube channel where I post theological (and other) videos for your enjoyment and edification. Some folks have suggested to me that using a podcast format would be easier, since it would provide more flexibility for listening on the go, etc. Therefore, I finally heeded the call, read a few web articles on how to do it, and set up a podcast feed with SoundCloud. The name of this podcast is The McKrakenCast . For anyone who might be wondering, "The McKraken" is a nickname given to me by some students, so the podcast is at least in part an homage to them. Below are a couple of pictures of gifts that they have purchased for me over the years that traded on this nickname. You'll see that the spelling is not exactly standardized, but I have my preferred spelling in the podcast name. Anyway, at present, The McKrakenCast will primarily provide a secondary means of access for my YouTube videos. But I may expand

Brief Book Note: Pedersen’s “The Eternal Covenant”

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Eagle-eyed readers of DET with sharp memories for detail may recognize this author and / or book. The author is a friend of the blog. He wrote two very good guest posts on Schleiermacher back in 2017, and I highly recommend them to you. In fact, pause your reading of this post and go read those two first: How to Understand Schleiermacher's Theology—A guest post by Daniel Pedersen . Authority and Bible in Schleiermacher’s Theology—more from Daniel Pedersen . The first of those two posts ended up in the top 10 posts from that year , where I also mentioned this book – which was very newly published at the time. Daniel James Pedersen, The Eternal Covenant: Schleiermacher on God and Natural Science , Theologische Bibliothek Töpelmann (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017). I can’t say enough nice things about this book. I’m no Schleiermacher specialist, but I’ve read a decent bit of his work and have been interested in him for a while, and this book was absolutely riveting. Daniel’s argumen

"If Faith Still Comes": an anonymous missive on Christianity's need for a revolutionary Oedipal act

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Note from the editor : You may recall, gentle readers, two previous anonymous missives published here at DET. The full title of the first post was “‘Jesus was a failure': an anonymous missive on the possibility of faith in the modern world,” while the title of the second was "'We must become the prayer': an anonymous missive on the pastoral task after the death of God." That same anonymous author has once again been in touch to submit a third and - as I understand it - final missive, which you will find below. We have once again decided to publish the piece in accordance with the author’s wishes. – WTM God appears as the invincible tyrant, the being in contrast with whom all other beings are without freedom and subjectivity. He is equated with the recent tyrants who with the help of terror try to transform everything into a mere object, a thing among things, a cog in a machine they control. He becomes the model of everything against which Existentialism revol

Top 10 DET Posts of 2018

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I have been casting my mind back, gentle readers, as I am wont to do, over the previous year here at DET. That I have been doing this in March rather than in January is, I think, evidence of how absolutely swamped I’ve been with other professional demands. And, no. Sadly, I don’t mean the demands of new writing and research projects, as much as I wish that were the case. Luckily for all of us, I have it on good authority that David Congdon is still managing to stitch together subjects and verbs, perhaps even sprinkling in the odd participle from time to time, so we will just have to look forward to what he will give us in good time. Meanwhile, I have been basting my mind back, gentle readers, as…oh, wait, said that already. Sorry. Here’s the annual post on the most trafficked (fair warning: traffic was not counted in an especially scientific way) posts over the previous year. If you’re curious, here’s the list from 2017 . DET 2018 Top 10 So You Want to Read….Dietrich Bonhoeffe