Peripatetic Pastor

Category: Conversations with the Culture

  • THOUGHT CONTROL

    THE PERILS OF BEING TALKED ABOUT It was an introductory Bible and Theology class at a small Christian college—a required course at the time. The students, mostly freshmen, many with Christian school educations, were bored before they arrived in class. I remembered taking the same class when I was a freshman and finding it almost…

  • PLAY IT THE BEST YOU CAN: ESCHATOLOGY AND KATIE KITAMURA

    Katie Kitamura, Audition (Penguin Random House, 2025) Preachers should read novels. Good novels open what otherwise we would not see. What’s more, novels teach preachers (all of us, actually) how to read. How to read, among other things, the Bible. The Bible is frequently novelistic. Or, better, novels are frequently biblical. The ancient Hebrew writers—the writers of…

  • REMEMBERING: MEDITATIONS ON THE PAST 1

    REMEMBERING Meditations on the Past, Part 1 Adria and I are recently returned from time in Europe. We visited among other places Berlin, Prague, and Vienna. In these places we were confronted with the remnants of the still close past, the history of Naziism and of Soviet era communism. In thinking about this history, I’ve…

  • A Totalitarian Bent of Mind: Peter Thiel, Carl Schmitt, and “Political Theology”

    “Seeking God . . . in Silicon Valley.” In my last post I promised to turn next to penal substitutionary atonement (PSA), an idea at the heart of evangelical theology and, I’ll argue, at the heart of evangelical politics. I will address PSA soon; I had every intention to do so in this post. But…