Speakeasy Theology

I’m glad to share some good news with you: we have founded St. Thomas Abbey in Ponca City, Oklahoma. This will be a place for sabbath, study, prayer, and spiritual retreat. I hope that, in time, many of you will be able to come and stay with us. Below is the letter I’m sending to potential donors. It explains how this has come about, the remarkable generosity that has made it possible, and what we need to do next as the process unfolds.

In the first lecture, I said the Song is not an allegory, and for that very reason ripe for allegorical interpretation. Thus, the synagogue and the church were not wrong to read the Song as they did and we moderns are wrong to think of the Song as either an allegory or “literal” love poetry. Perhaps all that was said too quickly, however. So let me circle back and say again what I meant, reemphasizing the difference I think the difference makes.

Egon Tschirch Song of Songs Nº. 8 1923 Egon Tschirch Song of Songs Nº. 10 1923 What, exactly, is the Song of Solomon doing in our Bibles? How are we to pray with it or preach or teach on it, given that God is never named, nothing even remotely religious is called for, and what the poems do describe is, well, disturbingly sexy? One approach is simply to let it be what it is, accepting that God means to embarrass us.

Colin McCahon Victory over Death 2 1970 This little essay by Nicholas Lash, the opening portion of his Believing Three Ways in One God, is a nice companion to Ernest Hello’s essay, which I recently translated. Theologically, what joins the two pieces is a shared confidence that Christ is the truth that trues all things and a belief in the seamlessness of consciousness and reality, a oneness that comes clearest in prayer, the liturgy offered in Christ’s name and to his praise.

Christ the Swordbearer | Visoki Dečani Monastery (Kosovo) | 14th cen. Ahead of this Fall’s Open Table conference, Jesus, Justice, and Your Neighbor, a few folks asked my rough-and-ready thoughts on the relationship between what we say about Jesus and how we are to think of justice. Here are a few notes. • You asked for a definition of justice in one or two sentences; I’ll give it to you in one word, a name: Jesus.

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.