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 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...
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,...
There is no politics that isn’t ultimately religious.
So we don’t shuttle between the jurisdictions of two kingdoms; we live in the seasons of contested rule, where the principalities and powers continue to grasp after an authority that has been taken fr...
So the emergence of art as Art creates room to expand unbelief; unbelief has somewhere to go without settling for the mechanism of a completely flattened universe but also without returning to a tradi...
Our sanctification is more like a Weight Watchers program than listening to a book on tape.
Our age makes higher demands of solidarity and benevolence on people today than ever before. Never before have people been asked to stretch out so far, and so consistently, so systematically, so as a...
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...
Not many people can confront the truth about themselves. If they did they’d run a mile, would take an immediate and profound dislike to the person in whose skin they’d learned to sit quite tolerably a...
Instead, Taylor is concerned with the conditions of belief — a shift in the plausibility conditions that make something believable or unbelievable.
Every political theology is exorcising demons—the question is which demons.
Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it's a matter of being the kind o...
What we believe is not a matter of intellectualizing salvation but rather a matter of knowing what to love, knowing to whom we pledge allegiance, and knowing what is at stake for us as people of the b...
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.
Those formed by such liturgies then become the kind of people who pursue and desire that end. So if we are unreflectively immersed in the liturgies of consumerism, we will, over time, learn that the e...
The upshot is a hermeneutics of suspicion; if someone tells you that he or she has converted to unbelief because of science, don’t believe them. Because what’s usually captured the person is not scien...
The secular3 age is a level playing field. We’re all trying to make sense of where we are, even why we are, and it’s not easy for any of us.
The orientation of the heart happens from the bottom up, through the formation of our habits of desire. Learning to love (God) takes practice.
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