blake.huggins

Suspicion and retrieval

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:20:08 -0500

I suppose, without great intentionality, that I read according to Ricoeur’s nice pairing of “suspicion and retrieval.” The “suspicion” is an awareness that every text and every reading, including my own, is laden with ideological interest. This is true of skeptics, minimalists, and fideists of all kinds. The “retrieval” is to see what may be said after one has done rigorous criticism. What one finds, after criticism, is that there is still this character “God,” who continues to haunt and evoke and summon and address. No sort of criticism, so it seems to me, finally disposes of that character. Now it may be that the character is an act of literary imagination; or it may be that the character is indeed an agent who is in, with, and under the text. Either way, one cannot dispose of that character. I find myself moving back and forth between a literary character and an active agent. Either way, that character haunts and causes everything to be redefined. But being haunted by this character is not just a confessional act for “believers.” I believe the best exposition of this testimony for “non-believers” is by Terry Eagleton in his Terry Lectures at Yale. Eagleton is not a “believer,” but he takes seriously the claims of this text that are more than “literary.” Eagleton shows that the claims are not merely cognitive and so readily dismissed by “silly atheists.” Rather, Eagleton sees that the claims of the tradition are that this holy character is linked to the valuing of “the scum” of the earth. The point is a practical one, not an intellectual one.

—Walter Brueggemann

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Hermeneutics and the second naïveté

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:20:06 -0500

The Image of Fish is an excellent new site you should subscribe to immediately. This video is about Gadamer and especially Ricoeur’s contribution to philosophical hermeneutics. Callid makes some excellent points. As I pointed out in my comment on the site, what is needed now more than ever is for the church — “progressive” theologians especially — to get over its romance with the historical-critical method and engage these thinkers.

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A decade in 7 minutes

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:01:10 -0500

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No description needed

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:12:57 -0500

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

For Fox Sake!

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

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What gets our attention

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:11:26 -0400

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American democracy is not my idol

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:43:15 -0400

I speak as a Christian- one whose commitment to democracy is very deep but whose Christian convictions are deeper. Democracy is not my faith. And American democracy is not my idol. To see the gospel of Jesus Christ bastardized by imperial Christians and pulverized by Constantinian believers and then exploited by nihilistic elites of the American empire makes my blood boil. To be a Christian- a follower of Jesus Christ- is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom. This is the radical love in Christian freedom and the radical freedom in Christian love that embraces socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope.

If Christians do not exemplify this love and freedom, then we side with the nihilists of the Roman empire (cowardly elite Romans and subjugated Jews) who put Jesus to a humiliating death. Instead of receiving his love in freedom as a life-enhancing gift of grace, we end up believing in the idols of the empire that nailed him to the cross. I do not want to be numbered among those who sold their souls for a mess of pottage- who surrendered their democratic Christian identity for a comfortable place at the table of the American empire while, like Lazarus, the least of these cried out and I was too intoxicated with worldly power and might to hear, beckon, and heed their cries.

To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely- to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away. This is the kind of vision and courage required to enable the renewal of prophetic, democratic Christian identity in the age of the American empire.

— Cornel West

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Indifference more deadly than hate

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:53:05 -0400

[W]ithin a large-scale setting, where the other lives at a distance, indifference can be more deadly than hate. Whereas the fire of hatred flares up in the proximity of the other and then dies down, the cold indifference can be sustained over time, especially in contemporary socieites. A “system” — a political, economic, or cultural system — insinuates itself between myself and the other. If the other is excluded, it is the system that is doing the excluding, a system in which I participate because I must survive and against which I do not rebel because it cannot be changed. I turn my eyes away (or I zoom in with a camera at some exotic exemplar of suffering, which amounts to turning the eyes away because it both satisfies my perverse desire to see suffering and appeases my conscience for having turned the heart away from the sufferer). I go about my own business. Numbed by the apparent ineluctability of exclusion taking place outside my will though with my colloboration, I start to view horror and my implication in it as normalcy. I reason: the road from Jersusalem to Jericho will always be littered by people beaten and left half-dead; I can pass — must pass — by each without much concern. The indifference that made the prophect, takes care also of its fulfillment.

— Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, pg. 77

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MatterCon Recap 3: Peter Rollins, "From Theo-logos to Theo-poetics"

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:35:49 -0400

MatterCon Recap 3: Peter Rollins, "From Theo-logos to Theo-poetics":

Last week I was at MatterCon ‘09: A Theological Creativity Event featuring Pete Rollins and presented by Shechem Ministries at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, TX. I am recapping the…

On Revelation

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 07:57:28 -0400

On Revelation:

You know that another semester is gearing up when I don’t have time to write up a blog post. I have been writing though. One of my tasks this semester in my constructive theology class is to…

MatterCon Recap 3: Peter Rollins, “From Theo-logos to Theo-poetics” http://j.mp/1rdZj5

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 06:17:44 -0400

MatterCon Recap 3: Peter Rollins, “From Theo-logos to Theo-poetics” http://j.mp/1rdZj5

had the worst leg cramp of my life earlier today. literally brought me to the floor. my calf muscle...

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 06:17:44 -0400

had the worst leg cramp of my life earlier today. literally brought me to the floor. my calf muscle hates me.

The War on Language

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:37:50 -0400

The War on Language:

Those who seek to dominate our behavior first seek to dominate our speech. They seek to obscure meaning. The English- and Arabic-speaking worlds are each beset with a similar assault on…

RT @trippfuller @nieuprovoker: is Losing his Historical Jesus! Are you? http://retwt.me/hiik // yup,...

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:13:48 -0400

RT @trippfuller @nieuprovoker: is Losing his Historical Jesus! Are you? http://retwt.me/hiik // yup, already did. it felt good. #fb

Losing My Historical Jesus http://j.mp/ilBKN

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 05:04:06 -0400

Losing My Historical Jesus http://j.mp/ilBKN

Losing My Historical Jesus

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 02:25:04 -0400

Losing My Historical Jesus:

So, I drank the kool aid.

One of the great joys of being at the Candler School of Theology has been the faculty that we as students get to engage with. Last semester it was people like Dr….

RT @joe_kennedy: To about a billion undernourished and starving people, eating contests must be the...

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:22:44 -0400

RT @joe_kennedy: To about a billion undernourished and starving people, eating contests must be the ultimate middle finger. #fb

Rob Bell on faith, suffering, and Christians http://j.mp/GkxWZ

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 19:41:25 -0400

Rob Bell on faith, suffering, and Christians http://j.mp/GkxWZ

Rob Bell on faith, suffering, and Christians

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 17:10:47 -0400

Rob Bell on faith, suffering, and Christians:

Rob Bell is one of the hottest names in contemporary evangelical life. He is the founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but is better known for his books,…

it would really make my day if LSU lost

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:04:22 -0400

it would really make my day if LSU lost

at a david tracy lecture at boston college on hermeneutics and religious otherness #fb

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:56:29 -0400

at a david tracy lecture at boston college on hermeneutics and religious otherness #fb