Faith & Theology is open again

I have had a long and rather intimate relationship with Ben Myers. For example: I have lived in his house, slept in his bed, mowed his lawn (or not), driven his car, drank his whisky, and helped raise his dog. In light of all this, I suppose it's not entirely unsurprising that I'm now taking over his blog.

It's not that there was ever anything untoward between Ben and me. It's just that he's one of the most generous people around. I first encountered Ben, not by reading Faith & Theology, but when he read and commented on something I had written online when I was still an undergraduate in California. Then I started to follow him here and on social media, enjoying the open-handed verve with which he pursued theological learning. I noticed that Ben's engagement with texts and ideas was always top-notch, but also that everyone was welcome at his table.

Several years later I started looking into Ph.D. programs in theology. I had my heart set on a big name school in either the U.S. or the U.K. The only thing was, I had no viable way to pay for one of these programs. Desperate, I started praying that Providence would make a way for me. During this period I reached out to Ben Myers on a whim, just to ask if he supervised Ph.D. research. The very next day, we spoke on Skype. Within months I was applying for a doctoral program at Charles Sturt University in Australia. Not only was I accepted, but Ben worked his charm and secured a full tuition waiver for this foreign student.

I arrived in Australia in 2012 when Ben and his family were on sabbatical in Germany. My wife and I spent our first couple of months living in Ben's home and caring for his legendary dog, Kola (R.I.P.). For the next several years Ben's generosity continued. He shared his life with me, taught me how to write, allowed me to teach alongside him, and saw me through to the end of my Ph.D. thesis in 2017. For my wife and me Ben's help was the key that opened the door to one of the most meaningful periods of our lives. We made many friends, we became Australian citizens, and we found our ecclesial home in the Anglican church. Perhaps most importantly, in emulation of Ben we acquired a goofy black Labrador Retriever.

I now live in Washington, D.C. where I minister at a church on Capitol Hill. I love my life here, but I've come to miss the rich theological community Ben creates around him wherever he goes. I want to find my way back into what I saw with Ben by going forward in my own way. Because of this I recently tweeted that I was thinking of starting a blog. Within hours I had a predictably generous message from Ben, offering me Faith & Theology. Everything came full circle today when I once again met with Ben through Skype and he handed me the reins. Like Elisha to Elijah, I requested from Ben a double portion of his spirit.  He said that, unfortunately, he had given away .6 of his spirit, and therefore that he could give me only a 1.4 portion.

Faith & Theology is open again. Stay tuned for posts on theology, philosophy, and culture, as well as reflections on scripture and book reviews. I can't fill Ben's shoes. I know this to be true because I've actually worn them before and they don't fit me.

Theological click-bait: number 7 will shock you!

Too many theology blogs are stuck in the past. Descriptive post titles are no longer adequate in today's world of social media sharing. I have compiled this list of theological click-bait to help my fellow bloggers increase their traffic. Please use them as you see fit.

Welcome to the future of online theology.

Ruether: This woman’s critique of patriarchy will change the way you see the world.

Hippolytus: He saw an early church baptism. What they wore will shock you.

Ignatius: This man wants to be eaten by lions. The reason brought me to tears.

Cyril of Alexandria: He says that Christ has two natures. How he joins them will blow your mind.

Athanasius: See why homoiousians HATE him!

Augustine: Can’t stop sinning? He’ll tell you why.

Pelagius: Want to stop sinning? He shares the secret.

Barth: He found the only good reason for not becoming a Roman Catholic. You won’t believe what it is.

Przywara: Find out why the works one of Catholicism’s greatest modern thinkers were never translated into English.

Gregory of Nyssa: He saw God in the darkness, but that was just the beginning.

Nestorius: His civil reform will make you dislike him. By the time he preaches you’ll hate him.

Luther: He wrote ninety-five theses. Number ninety-four will change your life.

Irenaeus: He says that this has happened before. See why it’s all better this time around.

Tanner: She calls Christ a key. You’ll never guess what he unlocks.

Basil: They wanted to leave their money to the poor in their wills. What he said in response will trouble you deeply.

Coakley: Kenosis is back. You'll never stop contemplating her critique of the critics.

Williams: They want to describe reality, but he wants to represent it. You can’t know what he’ll say next.

Keller: Life too orderly? Let her introduce you to the beauty of chaos.

Girard: He’s got his critics whipped up into a frenzy. Will they let him stay?

Bonhoeffer: He’s a pacifist in prison. You’ll never guess why.

New F&T group blog

Just a note to let you know that F&T is now officially a group blog. Hooray! This is long overdue, given that Kim has been posting here with me for about a decade anyway. But we're now also joined by Steve Wright, who will start posting soon. And if the Almighty blesses our endeavours, who knows, perhaps we'll be able to recruit another couple of writers down the track.

Words, words, words: F&T seven years on

Whoops! I started this blog on a whim, and it looks like it's been going for seven years now. Seven years! 

So I've just spent a few minutes glancing back over the archive – all those posts, all those opinions, all that writing. Looking back over it, I had a sinking feeling. 

Who wrote all those thousands of posts, and why? Why is this person so opinionated about everything, including things he knows nothing about? Why is he so quick to brag about the things he knows and so careful to conceal the things he doesn't? Why is he so dismissive of some people and so effusive towards others? And why does he write in this manner? All that pseudo-poetical posturing? All those dubious jumbles of metaphors? All those excitable outpourings of adjectives? Why is he never content just to state a thing plainly and be done with it? What is he trying to prove anyway? And to whom?

And why has he so painstakingly, so fastidiously concealed the real issues of his own life? His frustrations and disappointments, where are they? His anxieties, his doubts, his shame? His anger, especially with himself? The restlessness and hurt that he carries around with him – why has he disguised all that? What is he trying to bury under all those words? And who is he hiding from anyway? Only himself? 

Sifting through the rubble of words, I also noticed a few things I really liked. Some things were well said, and I'm glad somebody said them. Whoever wrote those bits, I rather like him. But I don't recognise him. I am trying to recall what might have motivated him to write like that on those rare occasions when he actually did write well. Was his thirst for affirmation so strong at those moments that it produced, of its own accord, something worthwhile? And even those best moments (I see now, embarrassed) are not half so good as they must have seemed when they were being written. All the excesses, the mistakes, the lack of discipline, the egotism – it's frightful to have to witness it.

But I'm making a mistake. I am talking about writing as if it were a thing in itself, a fixed object, a school exercise composed for an impartial examiner. When all along what this blog has brought me is friendship – the good and pleasant society of other people. 'Words, words, words' – they are very sociable things really. That's what good about them.

I remember now why I started writing here seven years ago. I was working in a tedious job, I went to a tedious church, I lived in a tedious city, and for the life of me I couldn't find anyone to talk to about the things that really interested me. One day on my lunch break I started writing, in the modest hope that someone might reply. I was like the castaway who rolls up his letter and puts it in a bottle and throws it away.

I wasn't disappointed either. Looking back over those 'posts' – all those letters in bottles adrift in cyberspace – the surprising thing is how many answers have come back, and how many friendships I've enjoyed as a result. The business of life is to acquire friends; and, as it turns out, a blog is one excellent way to go about it. It is surprising to think how big the cast of characters in my life has become, and how small it was before.

Forget about the writing, then. Perhaps it was all a mistake; no matter. I believe in the forgiveness of sins, otherwise I would never have the courage to write anything at all. 'We are beggars, that is true' – every paragraph proves it. And even if it was all a mistake, even if every word was wrong, I am glad for all of it when I think of all those friends I never would have had otherwise. (For instance: what could be more ridiculous than to go through life without knowing Kim Fabricius? What would be the point of a life like that?) I suppose that's what grace is all about. Not that your failures are erased, but that your worst mistakes become, by a mysterious providence, the source of all that is best and happiest in your life. You write badly, all the time, and as a result you get some friends.

So I roll up this note too, and shove it in a bottle for the waves. Why not? If I ever look back on these words one day, I suppose I'll be displeased and wish I'd never said it, or had said it better, or whatever. But perhaps someone, somewhere, will find it washed up on the shore. Perhaps they will open it. Perhaps they will answer: another friend!

Welcome to the new F&T

Welcome to the new F&T – after six years at blogspot.com, we've finally become respectable! The basic look is the same, but there are several new features – including a much better, more interactive commenting system (Disqus). The RSS feed should forward automatically – but please update your links and bookmarks to the new address, www.faith-theology.com/. 

I'm grateful to a couple of F&T readers who took care of all the technical stuff. Mitch Ebbott kindly purchased, and then donated, the domain name. The savvy and magnanimous Aaron Hampshire did everything else: he spent many hours working on the design, installing the commenting system, importing the 20,000 comments, fixing glitches, calming my nerves when the whole blog disappeared, and so on. I'm very grateful for this great generosity! And thanks to all those who recently discussed the question of whether to move the blog – this was really helpful.

Don't forget to update your links! Pretty please! www.faith-theology.com/

New site coming soon...

Sorry for the long silence lately. The new-and-improved F&T site is coming soon...

Moving the blog?

Lately a lot of bloggers have been moving to the big religion site, Patheos.com. The site hosts dozens of bloggers, including Ben Witherington, Scot McKnight, Fred Clark, Roger Olson, Mike Bird, John Holbert, and Francis Beckwith. (More info about the site here and here.)

Patheos approached me a while back too, but I haven't been able to make up my mind. Basically, the attractions are: (a) they'd pay me; (b) they'd handle all my technical needs – so some of the technical features of F&T would improve (comments, post sharing, social networking, etc); (c) F&T would still retain its own independent design, etc; and (d) did I mention the money?

On the negative side, (a) the site has unsightly ads; (b) I feel a bit weird about making Christian theology one niche within a wider "pantheon"; and (c) did I mention those ads?

Obviously the money is appealing: I've never cared about getting paid to blog, but once someone suggests the idea, it seems to have a hypnotising effect. I guess if I had the technical expertise I'd be inclined to get my own domain for F&T, and maybe find a couple of tasteful sponsors for the site. But lacking that expertise (or the time to acquire it), what do you reckon about the Patheos option? I'd love to hear your thoughts...

Once more with Rowan and Lulu

Oh, and speaking of children: my recent post on Rowan Williams' letter to six-year-old Lulu was the most popular post I've ever had at F&T. It was shared over 4,000 times on Facebook, and received loads of extra visitors from StumbleUpon. All in all, the post got about 27,000 hits in the first three days – and it's still making its way around Facebook.

I found this very intriguing: I wonder why Rowan's letter struck such a chord with so many people?

Barth blog conference: third week

The third week of the Karl Barth Blog Conference is now underway, this time focusing on recent continental philosophy. I'll add links as the posts appear, and you can also follow the links at the top of the sidebar:

• Introduction
• Barth in Conversation with Milbank and Zizek on the Atonement (by Paul Jones, response by Adam Kotsko)
• Barth in Conversation with Alain Badiou (by Michael Jimenez, response by Geoffrey Holsclaw)
• Barth in Conversation with David Bentley Hart (by Keith Starkenburg, response by Han-luen Kantzer Komline)
• Barth in Conversation with Jacob Taubes (my post, response by Derek Woodard-Lehman)

Speaking of Taubes, a reader recently pointed out that one of my blog posts on Taubes is quoted in a recent book by the French historian and polemicist, Daniel Lindenberg: Procès des Lumières: Essai sur la mondialisation des idées. F&T: bringing you the joys of Jewish anarchism since 2005. (Not to be confused with the terrifying spectre of English anarchism.)

Karl Barth blog conference

This year's Karl Barth blog conference is now underway, and it's bigger and better than ever. There'll be three weeks of posts around the theme of "Barth in conversation". Each post comprises a short essay plus a critical response. To keep up with the discussion each day, just follow the link at the top of my sidebar. Here are the posts so far:

• General introduction
• Week 1 introduction
• Barth and Schleiermacher
• Barth and Herman Bavinck
• Barth and Bonhoeffer
• Later this week, there'll be posts on Barth and Tillich, and Barth and Robert Jenson. (My own post, coming up later, is on Barth and the Jewish anarchist philosopher Jacob Taubes.)

The posts and comments so far are really top-notch – so head on over and check it out!

Article on theology and blogging

My paper on blogging is available now, "Theology 2.0: Blogging as Theological Discourse", Cultural Encounters 6:1 (2010), together with a brief response by Robb Redman. The journal has kindly made the article available for free download: you can get it here [221 KB].

Theological Graffiti: bloggers edition

by Kim Fabricius

In response to a suggestion by Halden, here's a final series of clerihews by Kim on theological bloggers:

An und für sich
All say brilliant, some say pricks,
And especially savage
With those who dis Slavoj.

Maggie Dawn,
This isn’t a come-on,
But at her winsome blog I’ve lingered,
Musing if she’s rosy-fingered.

Brad East
Blogs from the Beast –
He’s from Austin –
But at least posts good news to lost liberals from Boston.

Halden Doerge
Has meteorically emerged
As a star of the blog aperçu.
Some say it’s his brains, others the microbrew.

Jason Goroncy
Is keen on oenology as well as theology:
Which explains his supporting the Blues –
It’s the booze.

Richard Hall
Does it all
At Connexions, from matters Methodistic
To driving a fundy called DH ballistic.

David Horstkoetter,
Influenced by Metz and Bonhoeffer,
On theopolitics top-notch,
Flies high on frisbees, flying farther on scotch.

Cynthia Nielsen
Is so smart it’s a sin,
And she’s impeccably orthodox:
Also a fox.

Byron Smith
Thinks green, turns red, gets pissed
At escapist’s eschatologies –
And at misplaced apostrophes.

Jim West,
On a Swiss roll, never gives it a rest.
Typing away at a thousand computers,
He’s also a one-man theological Reuters.

Michael Westmoreland-White,
Hyphenated, like Baptist-Mennonite,
Southern as comfort, big as a barrel,
Conscientious at picking a nonviolent quarrel.

Request for help: John Webster on irony

Not much posting over the past few days: we've been moving house this week, and (to be honest) I've also felt a little dismal after my recent post on libraries. I liked that post very much, but I'm not sure I'll ever be able to write a better post – and that gives me the blues.

Anyway, today I need to appeal to my learned readers for some help. In my article on blogging (which is about to be printed in Cultural Encounters), I quote John Webster's remark that irony is "a sickness of the spirit". I was away from my books when I wrote the paper, so I just quoted this from memory, and I also provided a reference from memory (I felt sure it was from his "Theological Theology" essay in Confessing God). So I was checking the proofs yesterday, and I realised that this reference was incorrect. Now I'm starting to doubt whether Webster ever said such a thing. Did I dream it? Was it perhaps something I heard in a conference paper by Webster? Does anyone know of a place where he describes irony as a "sickness of the spirit"? If so, please help me out!

For your interest, here's the paragraph in which this (mis)quotation occurs – I'm discussing the playfulness of online theology:

One catches a glimpse here of what Karl Barth called the jollity of theology. When we speak truth, it should make a “joyful and pleasant sound”; “the theologian who has no joy in his work is not a theologian at all.” Of course, there is also a troubling side to such playfulness: one see this wherever a serious question or critique is brushed off with a friendly witticism, instead of being seriously engaged; or where our talk about God becomes marked by an ironic distance. John Webster is rather too severe when he describes irony as “a sickness of the spirit”, but he is surely right to see that ironic detachment is by no means identical with joy, and that an ironic stance may be hard to reconcile with the intense subjective involvement which theology demands.

Theology of money

The AUFS crew have commenced their next book event, this time focusing on Philip Goodchild's Theology of Money. Here are the posts so far:

1. Power
2. The end of modernity
3. Ecology of money
4. Politics of money
5. Theology of money

Theology of money

The AUFS crowd recently had a nice book event discussing Laurel Schneider's Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity. Their next discussion will focus on Philip Goodchild's Theology of Money – and if you want to join in the conversation, SCM are currently offering a generous discount on the book.

More from the Barth blog conference

In case you haven't been following this year's Barth blog conference, it's the best one yet – several excellent discussions of Barth's exegesis of Paul. Here are links to all the posts:

• Introduction
  
• Day 1: Travis McMaken on Calvin and Barth on Paul (with a response by Jason Ingalls)
• Day 2: Shane Wilkins on Paul and Romans 1 (with a response by Lynn Cohick)
• Day 3: David Congdon with an excellent post on God's No and the No-God (with a response by Halden Doerge)
• Day 4: Shannon Nicole Smyth on Barth's Shorter Commentary on Romans (with a response by Kevin Davis)
• Day 5: Nathan Hitchcock on Barth's resurrection exegesis (with a response by John Drury)
• Conclusion
  

A note on lists and blogging

Here’s an interesting observation that I thought about developing (but ended up excising) from my paper on blogging. Walter Ong refers to “the noetic significance of tables and lists, of which the calendar is one example. Writing makes such apparatus possible. Indeed, writing was in a sense invented largely to make something like lists: by far most of the earliest writing we know” serves this purpose (Orality and Literacy, 98-99).

Lists are an important part of blogging discourse. Before I began blogging, I never used to compile lists of any kind. Nowadays, blogging has shaped my thought-patterns in such a way that I often catch myself (almost unintentionally) creating all sorts of mental lists and categorisations. I usually resist the temptation to blog such lists, since I tend to feel that mere list-making represents a regrettable trivialisation of language. But it’s interesting to reflect that technologies of writing may have originally been developed for the express purpose of making lists.

F&T 2.0

As you can see, I’ve given F&T a complete overhaul. It still needs a bit more work – so while I’m tinkering with it, please feel free to suggest any special features that you’d like to see, or any improvements in layout.

Some of the new features include a list of all categories in the sidebar; the ability to subscribe to all comments (via the menu bar at the top); a list of related posts after each post; as well as Google’s sweet tabbed search function. I also thought it would be useful to list the latest comments in the sidebar, since sometimes discussions are rekindled on older threads (for example, a couple of weeks ago we were discussing Francis Schaeffer and Cornelius Van Til on a very old thread).

I’d also be interested to know if there are any preferences for the format of the blogroll. At the moment, the list simply shows the blogs in order of the most recently updated. Should I still include a full alphabetical list as well?

Once more on the self in cyberspace: a theology of avatars

I’ve been revising my recent conference paper on blogging for publication. I don’t mean to bore you with more excerpts – but here’s a brief section that I ended up deleting from the paper. (Technically, that means I’m posting my trash here. Sorry about that...)

In Cities of God, Graham Ward worries that virtual reality is becoming not “the other of the real”, but “a parallel world to the real one”, so that the ontological difference between them collapses. Ward’s analysis is, I think, correct. But this is not something to be lamented – as though the solution were to drive a deeper wedge between “real reality” and “virtual reality”. Instead, the significant point is precisely that the distinction between “real” reality and “virtual” reality is purely a nominal one. The virtual world is not a different place, an indistinct zone which one occasionally visits; it is simply the name for particular sets of practices and social relations.

Such a recognition – that cyberspace is no less “real” than the tangible, material world – is essential for any Christian ethical reflection on cyberspace. If I consume internet porn, I am not indulging in a “virtual” (i.e. less-than-real) act. If I have a conversation with someone on a blog, this is not a “virtual” act either; it is a practice involving particular kinds of relations between persons. If I have an avatar in a gaming environment, or in Second Life, this too is not merely a virtual representation of my true self; it is in some sense an extension of the self, a manifestation of the self under different social constraints and conditions. If my cyber-self is far more violent, more aggressive or more erotic than my non-virtual self, this might have more to do with the differing sets of social constraints in web environments: so that it is sometimes tempting to regard the avatar not as a virtual reality, but as an uninhibited, more real manifestation of the self.

If you want to insist that such an avatar could never be the “real you”, then you might consider how the “real” self is manifest in various day-to-day relationships. In our differing roles and relationships, we all deploy various personae or avatars: I have one persona at an academic conference, but quite another when I’m talking with my one-year-old son, and a different one again when I’m talking with a close friend, or with my employer. Which of these is the “real” self? Isn’t the self precisely an assemblage of such avatars, without the guarantee of any deep underlying essence?

This might all sound very postmodern and constructivist. But think for a moment of the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospels. Many scholars have bravely tried to develop a psychological profile of Jesus, to plumb the mysterious depths of his inner self. But the reason such attempts have so notoriously failed is that Jesus simply has no inner life; his identity is his deeds. One can know everything about him simply by observing what he does on the surface. When John the Baptist sends his disciples to inquire after Jesus’ identity, Jesus replies: “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them” (Luke 7:22-23). The true self is right there in front of you, right on the surface.

At a 1964 Halloween concert in Carnegie Hall, Bob Dylan offered the humorous remark: “It’s Halloween. I have my Bob Dylan mask on. I’m masquerading.” Is not every self an assemblage of such masquerades? Do we need to imagine the self as some deep underlying essence? Is the self not rather simply the continual surfacing of one’s being into material relations with others?

One more excerpt: blogging as a reading-together

Here’s one more brief excerpt from my paper on blogging – this is from a section entitled “Blogging as a Technology of the Self.”

Blogging is not only a new technology of writing; it’s also a new way of reading. In Christian antiquity, reading was a social activity, not a wholly private one. The earliest recorded incident of silent reading is found in Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine relates with astonishment Ambrose’s habit of reading in silence, a practice he had never seen before: “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.”

Centuries later, reading as an oral and auditory social practice still remained the norm. Medieval writers “assumed that their readers would hear rather than simply see the text,” and their texts “repeatedly call upon the audience to ‘lend ears’ to a tale.” Only in the tenth century did reading practices start to become typically silent and solitary; by the modern period, the internalised nature of reading has become entirely self-evident. So that a literary critic like Harold Bloom can now simply define reading as the love of solitude; while George Steiner can argue that the busy sociality of modern life is destroying authentic reading, since “serious reading excludes even one’s intimates.”

In the world of Web 2.0, the ideal of the solitary reader is waning fast. Blogging is a kind of reading-together. It is the formation of a new kind of community of reading. No longer is reading an activity reserved for the private study, that carefully crafted space where thought is cultivated under conditions of silence, leisure, economic privilege. To read a blog is to participate in a collective reading process: on any given day, we all read the same post, the same thread of comments and responses. Such reading is far removed from solitude: the reading is understood primarily as a stimulus to conversation, criticism, discussion. Here, reading is not so much an end in itself as the means to a particular form of community. The very act of reading thus becomes a collective project.

Although I don’t share George Steiner’s cultural pessimism or his investment in the Victorian ideal of leisurely private reading, I think he showed remarkable insight when, as early as 1972, he noted the decline of solitary reading. Young people today, he observed, “read against a musical background or in company. Almost instinctively, they resent the solipsism … implicit in the classic act of reading. They wish to shut no one out from the empathic tide of their consciousness.” All this in 1972: one almost feels as though he was prophesying the existence of blogs!