The Little Friar

Writing in the Dust:  After September 11 is Rowan Williams', former Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual reflections in the days and weeks after the murderous tragedy of September 11th.  A notable theologian, he was set to tape a program on spirituality at Trinity Church Wall Street, just two blocks from the World Trade Center, on September 11, 2001.  Along with others from Trinity, he escaped downtown Manhattan as the Twin Towers were collapsing. In this profound work written several weeks after the tragedy, he tries to put into words his Christian responses to the grief and shock and loss of that moment.  The subjects covered here are complicated:  The use of religious language, the end of war, the tricky slopes of globalization, and the manipulation of symbols.  Williams measures his words carefully, well aware that these are not areas that can be summed up in a few words. Williams offers some trenchant observations about the United State...

Philip Turner's Money, Sex, and Power:  An Essay in Christian Social Ethics is much more nuanced than the more-popular book by Richard Foster of the same title.  Sadly, it's also old enough now that it's out of print as well.  There is light and darkness in each of us, and in each of our congregations.  Turner takes the three primary temptations of Christian life (three temptations that finally are enshrined in the monastic reformations' vows of the third century onward) -- money, sex, and power -- and builds a Christian social ethic upon the deep foundation of trinitarian theology. Turner's target audience is the Church.  He is convinced that in ignoring these three temptations, the Church has erred in a couple of ways.  First, we have failed to see the significant impact Christians can have on society around us through a witness to God in how we structure our social, economic and political lives.  And second, our evangelical mission in the world...

In Resurrection and Moral Order , O'Donovan argues that Christian ethics must be rooted in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  He argues that the resurrection is the pivot point for assessing ethics in a Christian perspective.  Apart from God's revelation in Christ, we could not fully assess our present situations, anchoring our present in the event of the resurrection and the eschatological goal to which creation is moving.  O'Donovan maintains that Christian morality is a glad response to what God has done for us in Christ. To be Christian ethics, ethics must be rooted in the gospel of Christ.  Some Christians are ethical, without having a Christian ethic.   Some even want to separate their faith in Christ from a unique ethic, trying to operate on the basis of natural law and philosophical axiology.  To accept Christian ethics means to accept that the gospel makes moral claims and judgments.  Antinomianism and moralism are two dangers...

Being a Christian means learning to love in and with God's love.  But God's love isn't simply a feeling or even (especially?) a sentimentality.  It has a certain content to specific actions that one can only learn in submission to those who have developed its habits over a lifetime.  And that's why Bondi, in this deceptively little book, turns to the early Christian monastics for lessons.  The issues here are no where clearer than in the contemporary American political environment, with sisters and brothers in Christ who champion things God simply won't tolerate:  The hatred of others, exclusion, neglect, to name just a few.

Delores Williams is a first generation womanist theologian, and her book Sisters in the Wilderness is a major contribution to the canon of womanist theological ethics. In Sisters , Williams uses the story of Hagar, the Egyptian slave of Sarah and Abraham, as a metaphorical narrative to describe the lives of black women and their shared history in America under oppressive forces. The Hagar narrative represents a tradition of African American resistance derived from the same history as the African American liberationist tradition with two differences; first, the Hagar tradition is a black women's tradition (the liberationist tradition focuses primarily on the Exodus narrative and "the black man"); second, the Hagar tradition is not concerned with liberating the oppressed. Consequently, one may ask, does the religion of the Hagar narrative "set black women up to be de-humanized and exploited?" (p. 41).  Did religion confuse black women's understanding of suf...

Phil Kenneson is a recognized participant in the missional conversation.  He serves on the board of the Ekklesia Project, and has authored books and papers that address the missional philosophy over against popular church-growth marketing techniques.  (Phil has also been a friend of mine since grad school -- and we're both Blue Devil alums.) In this volume, he develops a core piece of his philosophy, that Christian communities, instead of "selling themselves" in the religious marketplace, should focus on positioning their communal and individual lives so that the Spirit can reproduce the life of Jesus in them.  This Christ-likeness is the "fruit of the Spirit", and is the key to the church's authentic witness.  In fact, "it is quite possible for the church to be growing and not bearing the fruit of the Spirit" (p. 11).  Kenneson suggests that when Christians concentrate on this "life on the vine", a transformation takes place...

After South Africa's stunning shift from apartheid to democracy in the mid-1990s, the work of creating a viable nation began.  South Africa's new leaders saw their nation not only as one composed of legislative, infrastructure, and commercial concerns, but one with a deeply wounded soul that needed to be healed. In No Future Without Forgiveness , Desmond Tutu tells the story of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), formed to address the countless crimes against humanity committed on all sides in apartheid's dark history.  Rather than burden the new nation with potentially endless criminal trials, wherein the accused are constrained to defend themselves against the threat of imprisonment and victims can only expect state-mandated retribution as a form of justice, the TRC gave victims and the accused the opportunity to simply tell their stories.  Tutu shows how letting victims and perpetrators face each other as humans fostered courageous acts of pen...

The New Catholicity:  Theology Between the Global and the Local suggests a theological response to the change of context and circumstances inherent in the phenomenon of globalization.  For Schreiter the concept of "new catholicity" is the appropriate paradigm or framework of which the Church might understand itself and its mission at the age of globalization.  Any theology needs to attend both its contextual and its universalizing dimensions.  Attending the new context of globalization gives a new shape to theology. I was introduced to The New Catholicity in grad school, in a course with theologian and missiologist Fred Norris, "The Church's Mission and Theology".  It's a powerful book that explores  the "increasingly interconnected character of the political, economic, and social life of the peoples on this planet" (p. 5).  Three processes have shaped the globalization phenomenon:  Political (with the fall of communism in 1989, the world has...

Mujerista Theology offers a comprehensive introduction to Hispanic woman's liberation theology written from the heart and convictions of experience.  Continually drawing on her Cuban roots, Isasi Diaz focuses on the life journey and struggles of Hispanic women as she develops a theology to support and empower their daily struggles for meaning.  With her own life journey always firmly connected to the grassroots experience of Hispanic women and to the struggle for liberation, Isasi-Diaz is a major spokesperson for the continuing need for liberation theology today.   With all that's in the news these days about Central American migrants seeking asylum in the US -- and fear-mongering that accompanies that news -- this is a must-read!

Comstock clearly announces his bias in the title, Gay Theology without Apology .  Comstock has absolutely no doubt about the destructive nature of homophobia, the catch-all phrase in current parlance to mean those who are opposed for whatever reason to homosexuality (I would like to see a different word developed -- the phobia part implies more than it should be implying in many cases of my experience, and leaves little room for a reasonable difference of opinion). Comstock's emphasis is on the well-being of the community and a reinterpretation of those parts of the community which do harm.  Comstock's definition of sin "is the violation of mutuality and reciprocity, typically in the form of dominance and submission" -- i.e., he sees the power-disparity between a man and woman as far more potentially sinful than a same-sex relationship would have.  Comstock freely reinterprets scripture, saying "the Bible is not a coherent rule book with a consistent, reliabl...

John Milbank's  Theology and Social Theory:  Beyond Secular Reason begins with the observation that "once there was no secular" and from there goes on to provide a sweeping account of the modernist construction of the secular and the ways in which modern theology has surrendered itself to the secular, conforming to secular standards of scientific "objectivity" and giving up any pretense to speak comprehensively. Milbank's account of the emergence of the secular positions modernist secularism in relation to Christian theology as a kind counter-theology or as a heretical offshoot of Christian theology. The secular worldview, he suggests, emerged from two sources: one "heretical" and one "pagan".  Both of these perspectives share an underlying commitment to the idea that reality is constituted by ontological conflict or chaos.  The difference between these perspectives is how they react to the inevitability of conflict. The "heretica...

John Howard Yoder's The Royal Priesthood:  Essays Ecclesiastical and Ecumenical  is perhaps one of his more difficult collections of essays.  But it's impossible to divorce Yoder's anabaptist theology from an ecumenical spirit.  Yoder here presents a strong argument of what the church of God should look like, act like, and think like.  He thoroughly demonstrates the absurdity of the Constantinian view and later Reformed view of church and state, owing much of his insight to the Anabaptists who maintained that one's citizenship is in Heaven and not of earth, nor within its governments.  Historically, he proves that when the church is independent and separate from the world's affairs, its witness is increased a hundredfold.

Letty Russell's The Church in the Round:  Feminist Interpretation of the Church  was one of the required readings back when I took my field ed as a seminary student.  In it, Russell presents a single central image for her theology of church:  The table.  She draws on the biblical images of the eschatological banquet table, of Jesus dining with tax collectors and sinners, and of the last supper.  This image of the church as a table, particularly as a round table, calls the church to be a place of equality, hospitality, and justice. That makes The Church in the Round  one of my favorite books on ecclesiology. Russell draws on three specific table concepts to ground her work:  A round table, a kitchen table, and a welcoming table.  Perhaps central to these is the image of the round table.  For Russell, the round table "is a sign of the coming unity of humanity" (p. 17).  It is a precursor to the eschatological banquet w...

F riends of God and the Prophets:  A Feminist Theological Reading of the Communion of Saints , by Elizabeth Johnson, reinvests one of the most important categories of theology -- "the communion of the saints" -- with a fresh memory and hope using deep spiritual wisdom and intellectual daring.  Known more for her landmark study She Who Is , Johnson helps us hear this God who lives in the lives of female friends of God and prophets.  "Their lives bespeak an unfinished agenda that is now in our hands; their memory is a challenge to action; their companionship points the way." Johnson admonishes believers to take on the intergenerational challenge of bringing justice and compassion to fruition in our world.  Spirit-Sophia would have us do no less. The saints really don't play that kind of role in the lives of the faithful these days.  But with them, there's a reason to hope, so long as we remember this God who does not leave us to our own selfish indivi...

Torture and Eucharist by William Cavanaugh is one of those important works that will probably be overlooked by pastors, but this account of the horrific torture and oppression of the Pinochet regime in Chile is gripping and emotional in the spirit of Elie Wiesel's Night .  Cavanaugh is focused on the Catholic Church's ecclesiology and self-perception which in the early years of the regime, was unable to respond as he believes it should have, but which later became the lone dissenting voice to this brutal military regime. The book begins with a exploration of torture as a means of social control.  Arguing that one should attempt to link the idea of torture with the idea of governance in the case of the Pinochet regime, Cavanaugh describes the practice of "disappearance" which became the hallmark of oppression in Chile.  Disappearance became the euphemistic parlance for those who had been abducted for torture.  The disappearances were sometimes simply r...

Try as I might, it's nearly impossible for me to believe that a young man in his 20s could write something like Sanctorum Communio ( the full text of the book is online here ).  I first read Bonhoeffer's dissertation as an undergrad, and I feel that I will never think of church in quite the same way again.  In fact, I feel like I've been given a view of a mountain that I know I must go back and climb again, but the overall sensation of its height is so startling that I'm not quite sure how to begin.  (Maybe, in a weird way, a kind of awed despair is the mark of all truly great books?)  They say that Barth's commentary on Romans fell on the playground of the liberal theologians like an atom bomb.  Well, Sanctorum Communio fell upon the theological playground of a young Liberal theologian like myself, and had much the same effect. Originally published in 1930, three years after it initially appeared as Bonhoeffer’s doctoral dissertation ...

Back in college, I had to the idea to read the entirety of the Church Fathers as part of my inquiry into Christian faith.  At the time, I spotted a Penguin classic of Augustine's City of God  that was reasonably priced, so it was one of the first investments I made in the Church Fathers.  I didn't look at the page count -- it's a massive work, at well over 1000 pages of small print, and required the perseverance of a saint to get through. The way Augustine structured the work is very interesting. It actually consists of 22 "books", each of which contain around 20-30 "chapters". These chapters are quite often only a couple of pages long, and each chapter has a full sentence for its title, summarizing the main point made in the chapter. This is very helpful and it breaks working through a book of this size into manageable chunks. If Augustine was alive today, I am sure he would blog each chapter, and tweet his chapter headings. The first major part of ...

Readers will know that I'm a week late in getting this selection up, but I've been plagued by an infection that turned out to be far more painful than I had initially anticipated.  So I had to take a break from writing.  Hopefully I can get back on track now. That said ... Practicing Theology is an important little volume of essays that explores how systematic theology can assist people of faith in negotiating the world as Christians.  Here, this collection of theologians puts theology to the service of the Church, and these "critical realists" (among whom I would count myself) make some robust claims about God's reality and God's relationship to the world.  And in the process, help us articulate the difference God makes in how we articulate culture and world. In what is perhaps the most important essay in the entire collection, Amy Plantinga Pauw turns the "gaps" that emerge from faith and practice in our culture into a rich theological spa...

It's no secret that I went to Duke Divinity School for the sole purpose of studying with Fred Herzog.  Lesser known, however, is that in the spring prior to my arrival on campus (1995), Fred and I had begun a correspondence.  In that exchange, I had asked Fred for a recommendation of books that he thought I should read in preparation for studying at Duke.  In that list of around 20 books, Fred had put Jon Segundo's The Liberation of Theology . Liberation theology is perhaps one of the most important prophetic movements in the Church these days.  They represent the ways of life and struggle of Christians around the world who have convinced remnants of the Church to open its eyes to human misery and oppose socioeconomic systems and political structures that perpetuate such misery.  Like all serious modes of inquiry, liberation theologies are predicated on crisis -- on human situations of tremendous danger and incipient possibility.  Such concrete crises inv...

Manana:  Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective is a rich theological account of Christian faith from a Hispanic perspective by one of the most articulate Hispanic theologians, Justo Gonzalez.  It weaves the doctrinal formulations of the early church on creation, the Trinity, and Christology into contemporary theological reflection on the Hispanic struggle for liberation.  Gonzalez is probably most known for his work in theological history, but this book is also richly insightful and unique among theological accounts. The Jesus that emerges from this account will look a lot more like the Jesus of Scripture and history precisely because he is seen through the eyes of the peasant, oppressed and marginalized.