Questioning Peter Rollins' grand story

I've got a new post up over at Patrol:

In reading various reviews and reflections on Robert Bellah’s latest tome, Religion and Human Evolution, I was reminded of some thoughts I had written down about Peter Rollins’ work. I have tried to cobble something coherent together here which conveys my general criticism, which is basically historical in nature. One reflection on Bellah at the SSRC blog entitled “The Return of the Grand Narrative” echoes a work Quentin Skinner edited many years ago called The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences. This collection attempted to provide a map for the major schools which had recently arisen in the human sciences, such as the Frankfurt School and deconstruction. I thought it might be useful to consider Rollins in light of this map (also useful for a reading of Bellah).

Read the rest here.

Beyond biblicism

My latest book review via Patrol:

In The Bible Made Impossible Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith makes an impassioned argument for a move beyond evangelical biblicism and theological liberalism. Biblicism is a package of beliefs and practices about the Bible which emphasize its “exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability.” The main thrust of Smith’s book is directed towards this package and the fact that evangelical adherence to biblicism has done nothing to prevent or even address what he calls pervasive interpretive pluralism. In other words, biblicists may share their biblicism with one another, but they ignore the fact that they radically disagree about an enormously wide range of beliefs and practices central to the Christian religion.

Read the rest here.

Faith in public

An excerpt from my latest book review over at Patrol:


"Should religion be monitored in our politics through a separation between the public and private sphere? Is such a division even possible? Do liberal constitutional democracies depend on this division? In A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Shape the Common Good Miroslav Volf addresses these and related questions, challenging the idea that religion should retreat or be restricted to the private sphere, diagnosing where religion malfunctions when it does, and outlining what an engaged public faith might look like for and from a Christian perspective."

Read the rest here.

Review of J. G. A. Pocock's Barbarism and Religion volume 5

H-Net has posted a review of J. G. A. Pocock's Barbarism and Religion: volume 5, Religion: The First Triumph, on their H-Net Review section, for anyone interested.

And for anyone keen to see Pocock in action, and on a subject intimately related to this volume, see this lecture video delivered last year at Sussex University's Centre for Intellectual History, "Anglican Enlightenment and Christian Revelation".

Online history

A recent Facebook link generated the idea of creating a list of great internet resources related to or for historians. The link in question was for a website dedicated to early modern English history, particularly the history of medicine: The Casebooks Project.

Personally, I've enjoyed some of the resources made availbe through the celebration of various historical births, deaths, or publications. This includes a great site hosted by Cambridge for John Milton's Paradise Lost called Darkness Visible.

As with most things that live online, I've used Delicious to track websites I've found interesting or helpful using the tags "history", "resources" and "online". You can RSS any one of those tags, if you want to follow along. And feel free to post any others in the comments.

A/theism: shared entanglements

In a recent post at Patrol I've suggested that diversity is a present-day anxiety shared by both atheists and theists, and that both groups feel the strain of addressing this challenge. This is hardly a novel point. But as Clifford Geertz observed some years ago in his essay "The uses of diversity", if diversity used to be envisioned across a landscape, it has now to be conceived more as a collage - internal as much as external to our cultures. A recent dust-up amongst the atheist community on the subject of misogyny seems to lend a bit more credibility to my claim, at least as analyzed on the A/theologies blog, that debates derived from and about diversity spill over the boundaries separating religion from atheism (and agnoticism).

On Charles Taylor

Source: NYRB.

Readers looking for a wider view of Charles Taylor's work than the somewhat ambivalent, narrow portrait given by James Wood in "Secularism and its discontents" can now take a look at Mark Oppenheimer's engaging attempt to concisely summarize Taylor's oeuvre in five points. While it's obviously an oversimplification, it's certainly an inviting one.