Speakeasy Theology

Ernest Hello, who died in 1885, was an eccentric and uncompromisingly anti-modern French Catholic, a man of deep contradictions and deeper piety. He lived much of his life in illness and obscurity, at war with resentment and despair. “Thou knowest I am too weak to serve Thee by suffering.

David+ and I discuss what it means to read Scripture as a whole—and the parables in particular—as the Word of the Lord, not like any other book. For those interested, here’s a link to the article we discuss at the beginning: You Are Not Meant to Understand Jesus was not, by any measure, a simple teacher. Everything he said eluded interpretation and frustrated comprehension. In the Gospels, no one really understands anything he says.

My homily tonight depends on three other homilies, which means you are getting four for the price of one. What is that, if not a bargain? A tariff? The first I heard last week at midweek Mass. The Gospel was Matthew 6. The homily lasted roughly half a minute and consisted of no more than three or four sentences.

Humanity is coming out of a modern enlightened optimism, for which the human is naturally good and about to build an earthly paradise of freedom, universal justice, and happiness. In this era of naive optimism, something happened in the Church’s consciousness that looks like the result or the echo of this bourgeois enlightened optimism, finding in it a favorable climate for growth, although, in the final analysis, it has a quite different cause and justification.

In the Name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Spirit. In her funny (and not-so-funny) book, An Unauthorized Guide to Choosing a Church, Carmen Renee Berry offers this (cringe) account of the much-misunderstood doctrine of the Trinity: In the Old Testament God’s identity was clear—there was one and only one God—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. With the appearance of Jesus, and later the Holy Spirit, the Christian concept of God got a little more complicated.

Rowan Williams on what it means to be "Pentecostal" Someone asked recently where I’d start if I were tasked with teaching an introduction to the Holy Spirit and the Christian life for young people or those new to the faith.

a letter to a friend on Resurrection, Ascension, and the meaning of our bodies Dear Malcolm, Today is Ascension Day, which is as good a day as any to respond to your letter. I love what you shared from Yannaras: the Church did not struggle for those first four centuries over an abstract metaphysic or “the soul of man”; she wrestled to save God’s body. Still, we must not be too quick to think we know what that means.

Pentecostalism is impossible to define. Despite how many of us talk about it, it cannot be reduced to a single doctrine or experience, including speaking in tongues. It cannot be defined by worship style or even “vibe.” Its origin story is impossibly complex. So much so that we are wrong to think of it as a single movement.

David+ and I, with more than a little help from Rahner and his idea of the unprinted catechism of the heart, discuss the meaning of Ascension and how it reframes what we think we know about what it is to be human.

Andrew and I talk about his early work on the Christian mystical tradition, as well as basic problems with much historical theology. We also discuss the relation of the divine and human in Cyril, Gregory Nazianzen, Dionysius, Maximus, and Rowan Williams’ Christ, the Heart of Creation. I recorded this last summer, but unfortunately we had a number of technical issues. Only recently, David+ Harvey was able to make a listenable version.