The Providence Public Lecture Series kicks off tonight at the McNally Robinson bookstore in Winnipeg. Over the next seven weeks faculty from Providence University College and Theological Seminary will be delivering lectures that aspire to make their scholarly work accessible to a broader audience. Each presenter will deliver their lecture on a Friday night in Winnipeg and then on the following Tuesday evening in Steinbach at the Cultural Arts Centre. Continue reading The 2019 Providence Public Lecture Series
Category Archives: Public Lectures
Responding to “A Plea for Pointless Preaching” – A Guest Post by Lissa Wray Beal
On Thursday, November 1, a surprisingly large and energetic group of pastors, professors, seminary students, and college students gathered at Providence to hear and engage in conversation surrounding my paper, “A Plea for Pointless Preaching.” The paper was an abbreviated version of an essay that I wrote for Minding the Web: Making Theological Connections. In the essay, I suggest that the work of “two Stanleys” – the evangelical mega-church pastor Andy Stanley and the theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas – present two contrasting homiletical paths open to preachers today. Since that volume will soon be appearing in print, I will not be reproducing the essay here. However, my colleague Lissa Wray Beal, who served as the respondent to the paper, has graciously allowed me to publish her insightful engagement with the essay here on the blog. Continue reading Responding to “A Plea for Pointless Preaching” – A Guest Post by Lissa Wray Beal
Upcoming Lecture: A Plea for Pointless Preaching
If you’re in the Winnipeg area on November 1, think about joining us at Providence Theological Seminary for my upcoming public lecture, “A Plea for Pointless Preaching.” My colleague Lissa Wray Beal, Professor of Old Testament, will be responding to the presentation. Here’s a little teaser for the lecture to whet your appetite: Continue reading Upcoming Lecture: A Plea for Pointless Preaching
Teaching Preaching in a Time of Cultural Change
The Canadian Society of Presbyterian History has released videos of the papers that were presented this past Saturday at the CSPH annual meeting at Knox College in Toronto. Here’s the video of my presentation of a paper entitled, “Teaching Preaching in a Time of Cultural Change: The Forgotten Story of John J.A. Proudfoot, Knox College.”
Back in Toronto: Upcoming CSPH Conference
I am going to be back in Toronto on the weekend of September 29 to present a paper at the Canadian Society of Presbyterian History annual conference at Knox College. The subject of my paper is the curious case of J.J.A. Proudfoot, the son of the distinguished 19th century Southwestern Ontario Presbyterian church planter William Proudfoot. Continue reading Back in Toronto: Upcoming CSPH Conference
Proclaiming the Crucifixion
The following is the conclusion to a lecture I recently gave, entitled “Parsing the Grammar of Atonement.”
All of the biblical metaphors for atonement are needed. They serve as necessary imaginative windows into the utterly irreducible reality of the reconciliation accomplished in the person of Christ. “The metaphors,” Colin Gunton observes, “are the means by which it is possible to speak of the meaning of the gospel narratives taken as a whole.”1 This quotation from Gunton is helpful as it gestures towards two significant aspects of how metaphors function, both of which are sometimes forgotten when the metaphors are pressed in an overly theorized direction. Continue reading Proclaiming the Crucifixion
- Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 42. ↩