Experimental Theology


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Happy Thanksgiving

Posted on 11.25.2009

One of those weird American traditions. The Annual Presidential Pardoning of the Turkey:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy



More history on the Presidential Pardon here.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This entry was posted by Richard Beck. Bookmark the permalink.

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Richard Beck

Welcome to the blog of Richard Beck, author and professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University (beckr@acu.edu).

The Theology of Faƫrie

  • Part 1: The Enchantment of the Inklings
  • Part 2: The Elvish Art and Desiring Dragons
  • Part 3: The Wonder of Things
  • Part 4: Glorious Treachery
  • Part 5: The Good Catastrophe
  • Part 6: The Fairy-Story That Entered History

The Little Way of St. ThĆ©rĆØse of Lisieux

  • Part 1: The Democratization of Holiness
  • Part 2: Story of a Soul
  • Part 3: "My Vocation is Love"
  • Part 4: The Practice of the Little Way
  • Epilogue: The Dark Night of Faith and Love

The William Stringfellow Project (Ongoing)

  • (Project Overview)
  • A Private and Public Faith
  • Instead of Death
  • My People is the Enemy
  • Free in Obedience
  • Dissenter in a Great Society
  • Count It All Joy
  • Imposters of God
  • A Second Birthday
  • Suspect Tenderness
  • An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land
  • Conscience and Obedience

Autobiographical Posts

  • On Discoveries in Used Bookstores
  • Two Brothers and Texas Rangers
  • Visiting and Evolving in Monkey Town
  • Roller Derby Girls
  • A Life With Bibles
  • Wearing a Crucifix
  • Morning Prayer at San Buenaventura Mission
  • The Halo of Overalls
  • Less
  • The Farmer's Market
  • Subversion and Shame: I Like the Color Pink
  • The Bureaucrat
  • Uncle Richard, Vampire Hunter
  • Palm Sunday with the Orthodox
  • On Maps and Marital Spats
  • Get on a Bike...and Go Slow
  • Buying a Bible
  • Memento Mori
  • We Weren't as Good as the Muppets
  • Uncle Richard and the Shark
  • Growing Up Catholic
  • Ghostbusting (Part 1)
  • Ghostbusting (Part 2)
  • My Eschatological Dog
  • Tex Mex and Depression Era Cuisine
  • Aliens at Roswell

On the Principalities and Powers

  • Christ and the Powers
  • Why I Talk about the Devil So Much
  • The Preferential Option for the Poor
  • The Political Theology of Les MisĆ©rables
  • Good Enough
  • On Anarchism and A**holes
  • Christian Anarchism
  • A Restless Patriotism
  • Wink on Exorcism
  • Images of God Against Empire
  • A Boredom Revolution
  • The Medal of St. Benedict
  • Exorcisms are about Economics
  • "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?"
  • "A Home for Demons...and the Merchants Weep"
  • Tales of the Demonic
  • The Ethic of Death: The Policies and Procedures Manual
  • "All That Are Here Are Humans"
  • Ears of Stone
  • The War Prayer
  • Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Experimental Theology

  • Eucharistic Identity
  • Tzimtzum, Cruciformity and Theodicy
  • Holiness Among Depraved Christians: Paul's New Form of Moral Flourishing
  • Empathic Open Theism
  • The Victim Needs No Conversion
  • The Hormonal God
  • Covenantal Substitutionary Atonement
  • The Satanic Church
  • Mousetrap
  • Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
  • The Gospel According to Lady Gaga
  • Your God is Too Big

From the Prison Bible Study

  • The Philosopher
  • God's Unconditional Love
  • There is a Balm in Gilead
  • In Prison With Ann Voskamp
  • To Make the Love of God Credible
  • Piss Christ in Prison
  • Advent: A Prison Story
  • Faithful in Little Things
  • The Prayer of Jabez
  • The Prayer of Willy Brown
  • Those Old Time Gospel Songs
  • I'll Fly Away
  • Singing and Resistence
  • Where the Gospel Matters
  • Monday Night Bible Study (A Poem)
  • Living in Babylon: Reading Revelation in Prison
  • Reading the Beatitudes in Prision
  • John 13: A Story from the Prision Study
  • The Word

Series/Essays Based on my Research

  • The Conflicts of Love
  • Death and Christian Art
  • Profanity
  • Satan and the Emotional Burden of Monotheism
  • Death, Gnosticism and the Incarnation
  • Summer and Winter Christians
  • Sinning in Your Heart
  • Quest Religious Orientation
  • Satan as a Functional Theodicy
  • Attachment to God
  • PostSecret

The Theology of Calvin and Hobbes

  • Table of Contents
  • Monuments of Self-Glorification
  • You Are Beloved
  • Kenosis as Pouring Out and Vomiting

The Theology of Peanuts

  • Table of Contents

The Snake Handling Churches of Appalachia

  • Part 1: Texts, Codes and Translations
  • Part 2: Religious Experience
  • Part 3: The Theology of Serpents
  • Part 4: Snakebite, Death and Victory

Eccentric Christianity

  • Part 1: A Peculiar People
  • Part 2: The Eccentric God, Transcendence and the Prophetic Imagination
  • Part 3: Welcoming God in the Stranger
  • Part 4: Enchantment, the Porous Self and the Spirit
  • Part 5: Doubt, Gratitude and an Eccentric Faith
  • Part 6: The Eccentric Economy of Love
  • Part 7: The Eccentric Kingdom

The Fuller Integration Lectures

  • Can We Believe in God Non-violently?
  • Monuments of Self-Glorification
  • You Are Beloved
  • Kenosis as Pouring Out and Vomiting

Blogging about the Bible

  • Unicorns in the Bible
  • "Let My People Go!": On Worship, Work and Laziness
  • The True Troubler
  • Stumbling At Just One Point
  • The Faith of Demons
  • The Lord Saw That She Was Not Loved
  • The Subversion of the Creator God
  • Hell On Earth: The Church as the Baptism of Fire and the Holy Spirit
  • The Things That Make for Peace
  • The Lord of the Flies
  • On Preterism, the Second Coming and Hell
  • Commitment and Violence: A Reading of the Akedah
  • Gain Versus Gift in Ecclesiastes
  • Redemption and the Goel
  • The Psalms as Liberation Theology
  • Control Your Vessel
  • Circumcised Ears
  • Forgive Us Our Trespasses
  • Doing Beautiful Things
  • The Most Remarkable Sequence in the Bible
  • Targeting the Dove Sellers
  • Christus Victor in Galatians
  • Devoted to Destruction: Reading Cherem Non-Violently
  • The Triumph of the Cross
  • The Threshing Floor of Araunah
  • Hold Others Above Yourself
  • Blessed are the Tricksters
  • Adam's First Wife
  • I Am a Worm
  • Christus Victor in the Lord's Prayer
  • Let Them Both Grow Together
  • Repent
  • Here I Am
  • Becoming the Jubilee
  • Sermon on the Mount: Study Guide
  • Treat Them as a Pagan or Tax Collector
  • Going Outside the Camp
  • Welcoming Children
  • The Song of Lamech and the Song of the Lamb
  • The Nephilim
  • Shaming Jesus
  • Pseudepigrapha and the Christian Witness
  • The Exclusion and Inclusion of Eunuchs
  • The Second Moses
  • The New Manna
  • Salvation in the First Sermons of the Church
  • "A Bloody Husband"
  • Song of the Vineyard

Bonhoeffer's Letters from Prision

  • Part 1: A New Theology
  • Part 2: Who is Christ for Us Today?
  • Part 3: World Come of Age
  • Part 4: Religionless Christianity
  • Part 5: The Arcane Disciplne
  • Part 6: The Man for Others

Civil Rights History and Race Relations

  • The Gospel According to Ta-Nehisi Coates (Six Part Series)
  • Bus Ride to Justice: Toward Racial Reconciliation in the Churches of Christ
  • Black Heroism and White Sympathy: A Reflection on the Charleston Shooting
  • Selma 50th Anniversary
  • More Than Three Minutes
  • The Passion of White America
  • Remembering James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman
  • Will Campbell
  • Sitting in the Pews of Ebeneser Baptist Church
  • MLK Bedtime Prayer
  • Freedom Rider
  • Mountiantop
  • Freedom Summer
  • Civil Rights Family Trip 1: Memphis
  • Civil Rights Family Trip 2: Atlanta
  • Civil Rights Family Trip 3: Birmingham
  • Civil Rights Family Trip 4: Selma
  • Civil Rights Family Trip 5: Montgomery

Hip Christianity

  • Part 1: Seeing and Authenticity
  • Part 2: When Bad is Good
  • Part 3: Christianity is Cool
  • Part 4: High and Low
  • Part 5: Stuff White People Like
  • Part 6: Selling Out

The Charism of the Charismatics

  • Part 1: Holy Ghost Conga Lines
  • Part 2: The Pentecostal Worldview
  • Part 3: Surprised by God
  • Part 4: Hermeneutics as Enchantment
  • Part 5: Bodies and Souls
  • Part 6: The Heart Has a Way of Knowing
  • Part 7: The Preferential Option for the Poor

Would Jesus Break a Window?: The Hermeneutics of the Temple Action

  • Part 1: Jesus and Violence Toward People or Property?
  • Part 2: Jesus, Empire and Othering Violence
  • Part 3: The Theological Scars of Empire

Being Church

  • Instead of a Coffee Shop How About a Laundromat?
  • A Million Boring Little Things
  • A Prayer for ISIS
  • "The People At Our Church Die A Lot"
  • The Angel of Freedom
  • Washing Dishes at Freedom Fellowship
  • Where David Plays the Tambourine
  • On Interruptibility
  • Mattering
  • This Ritual of Hallowing
  • Faith as Honoring
  • The Beautiful
  • The Sensory Boundary
  • The Missional and Apostolic Nature of Holiness
  • Open Commuion: Warning!
  • The Impurity of Love
  • A Community Called Forgiveness
  • Love is the Allocation of Our Dying
  • Freedom Fellowship
  • Wednesday Night Church
  • The Hands of Christ
  • Barbara, Stanley and Andrea: Thoughts on Love, Training and Social Psychology
  • Gerald's Gift
  • Wiping the Blood Away
  • This Morning Jesus Put On Dark Sunglasses
  • The Only Way I Know How to Save the World
  • Renunciation
  • The Reason We Gather
  • Anointing With Oil
  • Incarnations of God's Mercy

Exploring Preterism

  • On Preterism, the Second Coming and Hell
  • Rethinking Heaven and Hell: On Preterism, N.T. Wright and the Churches of Christ
  • Knowing the Things That Make For Peace
  • Dry Bones, You Shall Live: Preterism and the Resurrection of the Dead

Scripture and Discernment

  • Owning Your Protestantism: We Follow Our Conscience, Not the Bible
  • Emotional Intelligence and Sola Scriptura
  • Songbooks vs. the Psalms
  • Biblical as Sociological Stress Test
  • Cookie Cutting the Bible: A Case Study
  • Pawn to King 4
  • Allowing God to Rage
  • Poetry of a Murderer
  • On Christian Communion: Killing vs. Sexuality
  • Heretics and Disagreement
  • Atonement: A Primer
  • "The Bible says..."
  • The "Yes, but..." Church
  • Human Experience and the Bible
  • Discernment, Part 1
  • Discernment, Part 2
  • Rabbinic Hedges
  • Fuzzy Logic

Interacting with Good Books

  • Christian Political Witness
  • The Road
  • Powers and Submissions
  • City of God
  • Playing God
  • Torture and Eucharist
  • How Much is Enough?
  • From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart
  • The Catonsville Nine
  • Daring Greatly
  • On Job (GutiĆ©rrez)
  • The Selfless Way of Christ
  • World Upside Down
  • Are Christians Hate-Filled Hypocrites?
  • Christ and Horrors
  • The King Jesus Gospel
  • Insurrection
  • The Bible Made Impossible
  • The Deliverance of God
  • To Change the World
  • Sexuality and the Christian Body
  • I Told Me So
  • The Teaching of the Twelve
  • Evolving in Monkey Town
  • Saved from Sacrifice: A Series
  • Darwin's Sacred Cause
  • Outliers
  • A Secular Age
  • The God Who Risks

Moral Psychology

  • The Dark Spell the Devil Casts: Refugees and Our Slavery to the Fear of Death
  • Philia Over Phobia
  • Elizabeth Smart and the Psychology of the Christian Purity Culture
  • On Love and the Yuck Factor
  • Ethnocentrism and Politics
  • Flies, Attention and Morality
  • The Banality of Evil
  • The Ovens at Buchenwald
  • Violence and Traffic Lights
  • Defending Individualism
  • Guilt and Atonement
  • The Varieties of Love and Hate
  • The Wicked
  • Moral Foundations
  • Primum non nocere
  • The Moral Emotions
  • The Moral Circle, Part 1
  • The Moral Circle, Part 2
  • Taboo Psychology
  • The Morality of Mentality
  • Moral Conviction
  • Infrahumanization
  • Holiness and Moral Grammars

The Purity Psychology of Progressive Christianity

  • Part 1: The Purity Culture of Progressive Christianity
  • Part 2: "Do One Wrong Thing and You're Tainted"

The Theology of Everyday Life

  • Self-Esteem Through Shaming
  • Let Us Be the Heart Of the Church Rather Than the Amygdala
  • Online Debates and Stages of Change
  • The Devil on a Wiffle Ball Field
  • Incarnational Theology and Mental Illness
  • Social Media as Sacrament
  • The Impossibility of Calvinistic Psychotherapy
  • Hating Pixels
  • Dress, Divinity and Dumbfounding
  • The Kingdom of God Will Not Be Tweeted
  • Tattoos
  • The Ethics of :-)
  • On Snobbery
  • Jokes
  • Hypocrisy
  • Everything I learned about life I learned coaching tee-ball
  • Gossip, Part 1: The Food of the Brain
  • Gossip, Part 2: Evolutionary Stable Strategies
  • Gossip, Part 3: The Pay it Forward World
  • Human Nature
  • Welcome
  • On Humility

Jesus, You're Making Me Tired: Scarcity and Spiritual Formation

  • Part 1: The Biggest Obstacle to Spiritual Formation
  • Part 2: The Scarcity Trap
  • Part 3: The Therapeutic is the Political

A Progressive Vision of the Benedict Option

  • Part 1: The Promise and Challange of the Ben Op
  • Part 2: Avoiding the Ben Op of the Pharisees
  • Part 3: How to Avoid the Dark Side
  • Part 4: Why Progressive Christians Need the Ben Op
  • Part 5: Sabbath as Resistance
  • Part 6: The Limits of Liturgy and Becoming a Franciscan Community

George MacDonald

  • Introducing George MacDonald
  • Unspoken Sermons: The Consuming Fire
  • Unspoken Sermons: The Higher Faith
  • At the Back of the North Wind
  • Unspoken Sermons: "The Narrow Circle of Their Heaven"
  • The Real Emerald City
  • Unspoken Sermons: Justice

Jesus & the Jolly Roger: The Kingdom of God is Like a Pirate

  • Part 1: The Kingdom of God Is Like a Pirate
  • Part 2: The Violent Take It By Force
  • Part 3: The Curious Case of Capt. Jack Sparrow
  • Part 4: Raising Merry Hell
  • Part 5: Living Under the Sign of Death
  • Part 6: The Pirate Code of the Kingdom

Alone, Suburban & Sorted

  • Part 1: Bowling Alone
  • Part 2: Hollowed Out
  • Part 3: Broken Bridges
  • Part 4: The Big Sort
  • Part 5: Sameness & Shouting
  • Part 6: A Purple State of Mind
  • Part 7: The Third Place
  • Part 8: Where Everybody Knows Your Name

The Theology of Monsters

  • Part 1: Omens & Warnings
  • Part 2: Jekyll & Hyde
  • Part 3: Monsters & Heros
  • Part 4: Monsters & Scapegoats
  • Part 5: Illicit Hybrids
  • Part 6: Monsters & Death
  • Part 7: Hospitality & Monsters

The Theology of Ugly

  • "Ugly" as a theological category
  • Spirituality and aesthetics
  • Ugly and ethics
  • The ugly cross
  • The Isenheim Altarpiece
  • Pied beauty
  • Christina's World

Orthodox Iconography

  • Notes on Icons: Stylization
  • Notes on Icons: Light
  • Notes on Icons: Time and Space
  • Notes on Icons: Perspective
  • Nativity, Baptism, and Transfiguration
  • The Crucifixion
  • The Harrowing of Hell
  • Christ Pantokrator
  • John the Baptist

Musings On Faith, Belief, and Doubt

  • The Meanings Only Faith Can Reveal
  • Pragmatism and Progressive Christianity
  • Doubt and Cognitive Rumination
  • A/theism and the Transcendent
  • Kingdom A/theism
  • The Ontological Argument
  • Cheap Praise and Costly Praise
  • god
  • Wired to Suffer
  • A New Apologetics
  • Orthodox Alexithymia
  • High and Low: The Psalms and Suffering
  • The Buddhist Phase
  • Skilled Christianity
  • The Two Families of God
  • The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity
  • Theodicy and No Country for Old Men
  • Doubt: A Diagnosis
  • Faith and Modernity
  • Faith after "The Cognitive Turn"
  • Salvation
  • The Gifts of Doubt
  • A Beautiful Life
  • Is Santa Claus Real?
  • The Feeling of Knowing
  • Practicing Christianity
  • In Praise of Doubt
  • Skepticism and Conviction
  • Pragmatic Belief
  • N-Order Complaint and Need for Cognition

Holiday Musings

  • Everything I Learned about Christmas I Learned from TV
  • Advent: Learning to Wait
  • A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 1
  • A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 2
  • It's Still Christmas
  • Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
  • The Deeper Magic: A Good Friday Meditation
  • Palm Sunday with the Orthodox
  • Growing Up Catholic: A Lenten Meditation
  • The Liturgical Year for Dummies
  • "Watching Their Flocks at Night": An Advent Meditation
  • Pentecost and Babel
  • Epiphany
  • Ambivalence about Lent
  • On Easter and Astronomy
  • Sex Sandals and Advent
  • Freud and Valentine's Day
  • Existentialism and Halloween
  • Halloween Redux: Talking with the Dead

The Offbeat

  • Batman and the Joker
  • The Theology of Ugly Dolls
  • Jesus Would Be a Hufflepuff
  • The Moral Example of Captain Jack Sparrow
  • Weddings Real, Imagined and Yet to Come
  • Michelangelo and Neuroanatomy
  • Believing in Bigfoot
  • The Kingdom of God as Improv and Flash Mob
  • 2012 and the End of the World
  • The Polar Express and the Uncanny Valley
  • Why the Anti-Christ Is an Idiot
  • On Harry Potter and Vampire Movies

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