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

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Happy Thanksgiving

Posted on 11.25.2009

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

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More history on the Presidential Pardon here.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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

One thought on “Happy Thanksgiving”

Angie Van De Merwe on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 said:

Do you think this is why Ben Franklin didn't win the "turkey" as our "national emblem"?:)
Happy Thanksgiving to you, too...

Leave a Reply

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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 Faërie

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. Thérèse 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 Misérables
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 (Gutiérrez)
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

Archives

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