Experimental Theology

...trudging into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus...the Lord out of dust had created him, had made him blood and nerve and mind, had made him to bleed and weep and think, and set him in a world of loss and fire... --Flannery O'Connor

7.26.2021

Sunset Is My Business

I recently came across this lovely story about Abraham Joshua Heschel. While a young doctoral student in Berlin Heschel was walking the cit...

7.23.2021

Pascal's Pensées: Week 18, Foxhole

326. Anyone with only a week to live will not find it in his interest to believe that all this is just a matter of chance. Now, if we were n...

7.22.2021

On Divine and Human Agency: Part 7, Keeping the Balance

Okay, last post in this series. Tanner concludes her analysis about God's transcendence in relation to human agency by discussing the &...

7.21.2021

On Divine and Human Agency: Part 6, A Bad Habit and Forgetting Gratitude and Praise

My hunch is that many readers will find, or have been finding, all the metaphysical abstractions of this series a bit much. Personally, I lo...

7.20.2021

On Divine and Human Agency: Part 5, The Horizontal and the Vertical

Kathryn Tanner's two rules for speaking of God's transcendence in relation to creation might seem way too abstract to help us in a c...

7.19.2021

On Divine and Human Agency: Part 4, Two Rules for Talking about God's Transcendence

Assuming you've read Part 3, following from a non-contrastive metaphysics Kathryn Tanner in God and Creation sets out two rules for ta...

7.16.2021

Pascal's Pensées: Week 17, At Home in the Universe?

201. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread. /// Here we have one of Pascal's most famous lines. Are we at hom...

7.15.2021

On Divine and Human Agency: Part 3, A Non-Contrastive Metaphysics of Transcendence and Immanence

According to Kathryn Tanner in God and Creation in Christian Theology , the problem with a contrastive metaphysics is univocality of being. ...

7.14.2021

On Divine and Human Agency: Part 2, A Contrastive Metaphysics of Transcendence and Immanence

One of the things I argued for in January in my series on mental health was that we need a fresher, clearer metaphysical approach to divine ...

7.13.2021

On Divine and Human Agency: Part 1, The Soteriological To Therapeutic Shift

Back in January I devoted a series of posts to what I called "the metaphysics of mental health." The purpose of those posts was t...

7.12.2021

On the Existence of God: The Argument from Evil

Here's "an argument from evil" for the existence of God: 1. If evil is a problem, then God exists. 2. Evil is a problem. 3. Th...

7.09.2021

Pascal's Pensées: Week 16, The HPtFtU

33. What amazes me most is to see that everyone is not amazed at their own weakness. /// I don't know if Pascal got it right with this o...

7.08.2021

On Nondual Thinking: Part 5, Apocalyptic Paul

Nondual paradigms don't just struggle getting Jesus right, they also struggle getting Paul right. There's a broad scholarly consens...

7.07.2021

On Nondual Thinking: Part 4, The Dualisms of the Cosmic Christ

One response to my last post, about the dualisms that show up in the gospels, might be that this observation really only holds for the Synop...

7.06.2021

On Nondual Thinking: Part 3, Dualistic Jesus

In conversations about nonduality Jesus is pointed to as the primary example of nondual thinking. And yet, I think that is a hard case to ma...

7.05.2021

On Nondual Thinking: Part 2, Gnosticism

I confess that, right from the very start, the thing that gave me pause about "nondual thinking" was that it was about consciousne...

7.02.2021

Pascal's Pensées: Week 15, Distrusting Human Justice

520. I spent much of my life believing that there was such a thing as justice, and in this I was not mistaken, for in so far as God has chos...

7.01.2021

On Nondual Thinking: Part 1, Definitions

A focus on "nondual" thinking or "nonduality" is all the rage among Christians, especially progressive Christians. And y...

6.30.2021

America's First Social Justice Warriors

We hear a lot about the "purity culture" of American evangelicalism. This prudish, morbid obsession about sex is often taken to be...

6.29.2021

On Conspiracy Theories and Christianity: Part 12, To Love a Conspiracy Theorist

Final post in this series. What are supposed to do when a family member, or someone we love, becomes a QAnon believer or endorses the Big Li...

6.28.2021

On Conspiracy Theories and Christianity: Part 11, Family Matters

So, what do you do when a family member goes down the rabbit hole and becomes a believer in QAnon, or endorses the Big Lie? There have been ...

6.25.2021

Pascal's Pensées: Week 14, We Want to Live an Imaginary Life in the Eyes of Others

806. We are not satisfied with the life we have in ourselves and our own being. We want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others, and...

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