What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect?
Too much of our cultural analysis is rooted in thinking-thingism: we scan culture, listening for messages, bent on rooting out false teachings. But if we are first and foremost lovers, and if our acti...
These are not naturally occurring phenomena; they are the fruit of culture, the products of human making. In blessing the bread and giving thanks for it, Jesus not only hallows the stuff of the earth,...
So we have a twofold challenge to the social task of forging life in common: the deep, confessional diversity that shapes how we think about a life well lived and the norms for a good society; and the...
Our essential embodiment will keep interrupting our Platonic desire to do away with the body, will keep insinuating itself into our dualistic discourses to remind us that the triune God of creation tr...
One of the functions of Revelation [or of worship] was to purge and to refurbish the Christian imagination. It tackles people’s imaginative response to the world, which is at least as deep and influen...
Jennings cites Jean-François Lyotard: Contemporary society no longer speaks of fraternity at all, whether Christian or republican. It only speaks of the sharing of the wealth and benefits of ‘developm...
It is because we are God’s ambassadors and image bearers, charged with caring for creation, that we bring to him the concerns of creation, praying for each other, for the church, and for the world at...
Instead, Taylor is concerned with the conditions of belief — a shift in the plausibility conditions that make something believable or unbelievable.
In the action of gathering, there is a visceral training of our imagination that shapes how we subsequently think about our identity and our calling as human, in relation to God and in relation to oth...
We are witnessing to the fact that God’s action in the cross and resurrection has made it possible for humanity to be human, to take up their creational vocation
The distorted understanding of worldview that dominates current models assumes a rationalist, intellectualist, cognitivist model of the human person; as a result, it fails to honor the fact that we ar...
Often we look for the Spirit in the extraordinary when God has promised to be present in the ordinary.
Hoping to find a language for death. In his hands, the language of death is democratic — which makes good sense since death is quite impartial (talk about e pluribus unum!).
What draws people away from traditional, institutional religion is largely the success of consumer culture — the stronger form of magic found in the ever-new glow of consumer products
Todd Billings has articulated the dynamics of theological interpretation in a way that resonates with my account of Derrida’s emphasis on context and communal criteria for what constitutes a good inte...
To recognize the limits of knowledge is not to embrace ignorance. We don’t need less than knowledge; we need more. We need to recognize the power of habit.
To be human, we could say, is to desire the kingdom—some kingdom. To call it a kingdom is to signal that we’re not talking only about some personal, private Eden—some individual nirvana—but that we al...
The eucharistic feast is a tiny normative picture of the justice that characterizes the coming kingdom of God, where none go hungry because of poverty or alienated labor
The announcement of the law reminds us that we inhabit not nature, but creation, fashioned by a Creator, and that there is a certain grain to the universe—grooves and tracks and norms that are part of...