Not that love dispenses with knowing or requires some sacrifice of intelligibility, but love becomes, instead of and in the place of intuitus, the keeper of evidence, the royal road to knowledge: “When speaking of things human, we say that we should know them before loving them—a saying which has become proverbial. Yet the saints,…
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Art
My Big Problem With Sin
I am at an interesting place right now in regard to thinking about the subject of sin. After hearing sermon after sermon on the subject, reading book after book, having conversation after conversation, I’m convinced of pretty much one thing: For me, the biggest problem that human beings have with sin, is that we try…
Why I’m A Hypocrite
This is a developing thought that has influences which are vast. It’s the kind of idea that rattles around with no place to go. So I thought I’d share it, no matter how incoherent it may be. The idea is simple: I’m not afraid to be a hypocrite. It’s true that traditionally, being hypocritical is…
What theology needs is more copulation.
What theology needs is more copulation. And postmodern theopoetics may well provide it. The word copulation, of course, denotes coupling: the bringing together and/or union of two things. The related words “copula” and “copulative” are grammatical terms, used to describe the linking of elements in a sentence. How unfortunate, then, that the fertile term copulation…
Poem Without Forgiveness by Dean Young
The husband wants to be taken back into the family after behaving terribly, but nothing can be taken back, not the leaves by the trees, the rain by the clouds. You want to take back the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel remains in the wound, some mud. Night after night Tybalt’s stabbed so…
Anabaptism leads to disorder.
“Papists”, wrote English Protestant Nicholas Lesse in 1550, “although they were right nought for the soul, yet were they good and profitable for the body for civil commonwealths, for the maintenance of civil justice, and all good politic orders. But as for these [Anabaptists] they are neither good for the body nor for the soul:…
My Beloved Waits
My beloved waits. She fills her days with humble tasks. When I look at her I see myself–my eyes, my thoughts, my cry, my laugh. Before I knew her I was but half, yet convinced that I was whole. “Now that I know you, I realize it’s you I’ve longed to hold.” Together we will…
“Creativity” is the universal of universals
“Creativity” is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. “Creativity” is the principle of novelty….
Truth, Lost in Translation
“Truth and trust are closely related words, as displayed in the archaic form of the word for truth, “troth,” as in “to pledge your troth.” “Truth” at its root signifies a covenant of trustworthiness, in a marriage contract. To be true to another means to be trusty! This root meaning is not peculiar to European…
You be lovers, in my image.
Greg Boyd is the pastor of Woodland Hills Church in Minnesota. I’ve been listening to his series on Divine love and was so delighted by one of his teachings about contracts vs. covenants that I transcribed a bunch of the sermon to post here. Here is Boyd speaking about the difference between contracts and covenants….