anniversary adventure

My wife and I recently celebrated our first anniversary this last weekend. Since I had never really been to Shaker Village down in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, my wife encouraged us in that direction. But, since the weather was extraordinarily nice, we decided (kind of at the last minute) to ride our tandem bicycle instead of drive (for a total round trip of about 50 miles). It was a nice ride except for the 400 foot elevation over a quarter of a mile after we crossed the Kentucky River. That was a little bit rough, but even that part of our trek was beautiful riding. By the time we got home, our only complaint was sore bottoms.

pet peeve

I'm starting to highly dislike authors who make lists of several different options/solutions to a given situation/dilemma and then conclude with: "There's strengths and weaknesses to every option," and then proceed to give a caricaturish (and amateurish) evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of each individual position listed, proposing, in the end, an alternative meta-solution which incorporates all the strengths of all the other positions. (The social sciences appear to be most prone to this.) Not only is this really naive (and arrogant), it's just plain insulting to a half-way educated reader. I find it to be the trademark of modern liberal Protestantism.

random . . . and funny

This is quite possibly the funniest thing I've read for quite some time. It comes from John L. McKenzie's The Two-edged Sword: An Interpretation of the Old Testament (93-94) which is quoted by Mary Daly in The Church and the Second Sex (179-184) as contained within Barbara MacHaffie's edited collection of excerpts, Readings in Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition (212). Here is is:

We have already noticed that in the Mesopotamian myths sex was as primeval as nature itself. The Hebrews could not accept this view, for there was no sex in the God they worshipped. God is, of course, masculine, but not in the sense of sexual distinction, and the Hebrew found it necessary to state expressly, in the form of a story, that sex was introduced into the world by the creative Deity, who is above sex as he is above all things which he made.

semester over; blog remembered

My semester officially came to a close last week, a semester which included my magnum opus so to speak: my thesis and accompanying oral defense/examination. Hopefully, I'll have more time to post random tid-bits of nothingness again.

book update

I’ve been somewhat occupied with other things lately and have consequentially neglected this blog. In regards to my thesis, I’ve recently read John Milbank’s The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural, James K. A. Smith’s The Devil Reads Derrida: And Other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts, and DeRoo and Lightbody’s (eds) The Logic of Incarnation: James K. A. Smith’s Critique of Postmodern Religion.

Milbank’s work is okay, being a brief foray into R.O.’s indebtedness to la nouvelle theologie (which I sometimes think gets under estimated), particularly (and obviously) Henri de Lubac’s suspended-middle ontology.

Smith’s work was much more ‘fun’ to read, being written for the educated “lay-person” and in the traditional Smithian polemical style. I’ve grown to love Smith’s biting critique of trendy, fashionable, and so-called ‘postmodern’ Christianity that is still entrenched in modernity . . . whether this be an academic critique of Derrida and Caputo (available in other writings by Smith) or less academic critiques of the ‘emergent church’ (e.g., McLaren and company) which occupies a few of the essays collected here.

DeRoo and Lightbody’s edited work was also intriguing, if only because my thesis is concerned extensively with Smith’s “logic of Incarnation”. Some of the concerns voiced by the various authors were repetitive (stemming from an ontology of violence which runs counter to Smith’s logic of Incarnation), but there were a few very good articles. Among them were Smith’s own “The Logic of Incarnation: Towards a Catholic Postmodernism,” Neal Deroo’s “Determined to Reveal: Determination and revelation in Derrida,” and Mark Bowald’s “Who’s Afraid of Theology?: A Conversations with James K. A. Smith on Dogmatics as the Grammar of Christian Particularity.” The latter was probably most helpful, having fleshed out some tensions/problems I found in my own reading of Speech and Theology as compared with Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? and Introducing Radical Orthodoxy.

Pickstock - After Writing

Pickstock's After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy is quite possibly the best book I've read in a long time:

". . . Aquinas shows that for every creature such a interval between esse and essentia exists and is constitutive of its reality. From essence, no existence follows, and existence is received from elsewhere, from God who exists of his very nature and not in this or that manner. Hence every creature is "pulled" by its participation in esse beyond its own peculiar essence - it exceeds itself by receiving existence - and no created 'substance' is truly substantial, truly self-sufficient, absolutely stable or self-sustaining. It follows that the violation of the substance/accident contrast and the gap between esse and essence in the case of transubstantiation is only an extreme case of what, for Aquinas, always applies. All substances are 'accidents' in contrast to divinity, and become signs which, in their essence, realize a repetition and revelation of the divine 'substance'" (261).

New Semester

I e-mailed my final paper for my summer independent study on postliberalism today, though I still need to finish reading Goh.

This week also marks the beginning of a new semester . . . I'm only taking two classes:

• CH755: The Theology of Martin Luther (3 hrs)
• IS790: Thesis (6 hrs)

tandem bicycle

I've been looking for a tandem bicycle for quite some time. My wife currently rides a cruiser (and is somewhat afraid of riding a road bike by herself) while I ride an old 1993 Trek 2200. Needless to say, we can't ride together very well . . . her bike is just too slow. The short story is that I found a 1973 Gitane road tandem in nearly perfect condition on Craig's List. Needless to say, we're both pretty excited about it. It has:

• Reynolds 531 lugged frame,
• Mafac cantilever brakes (brazed on),
• TA triple chain ring (26-47-52),
• Phil Wood bottom bracket for stroker,
• Campy Grand Tourismo rear derailleur,
• Campy (Record?) front derailleur,
• Sun Tour bar end shifters,
• Campy Record high flange front hub,
• and HI-E sealed bearing Hi/low rear hub.

Here it is (before it was cleaned up):

thesis proposal

My initial thesis proposal has been finished and e-mailed to the appropriate authorities. I feel much better.

Marilynne Robinson - Gilead

I finished reading Marilynne Robinson's 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning Gilead last week which was, in many ways, complimentary with my postliberal theology class. Take for instance, John Ames's comment that "[Love] makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?" (238). Here we see the fictitious narrator, John Ames, refusing to grant scientific (cause/effect) narratives "meta" status, a prominent theme for postliberalism with its emphasis on a cultural-linguistic, Wittgensteinian understanding of religion. Robinson's book as a whole appears to be a full frontal attack on modernity coupled with a dogmatic promotion of the scandal of particularity. Though her primary foe is universal scientific rationality, she likewise refuses to reduce the "mystery" of creation to any other modern reductionism, such as radical individualism. All-in-all, I couldn't help but read her work as a re-enchantment of a modern, de-chanted cosmos . . . a thrust she accomplishes through the words of a dying pastor from Iowa during the mid-2oth century.