In Minding the Web, I suggested that future scholars interested in the life and legacy of Stanley Hauerwas will have to somehow account for the significant number of public lectures, interviews and podcasts that are now circulating on the internet. Two notable examples of the latter that have recently appeared are Hauerwas’s conversation on the theme of suffering with Kate Bowler on her podcast Everything Happens and his appearance on the Theology on Mission podcast with David Fitch and Mike Moore. In the latter, I receive a generous shout-out from Stanley. Kate Bowler, who was born in Winnipeg and now teaches at Duke, has quickly become a prominent public pastoral figure with respect to the subject of suffering. David Fitch remains a significant neo-Anabaptist voice in evangelical circles and provided a gracious endorsement of Minding the Web.
Tag: mission
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Review of Taylor’s “Reading Scripture as the Church”
The following is a review of Derek W. Taylor’s Reading Scripture as the Church: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Hermeneutic of Discipleship that I contributed to Studies in Christian Ethics 35(2) (May 2022): 418-421.
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“God’s Unpredictable Plans”
The following is a response I was invited to recently give to chapter 1 of Matt Brough’s forthcoming book Let God Send: Crossing Boundaries and Serving in Christ’s Name. Matt is the Minister of Word and Sacraments at Prairie Presbyterian Church in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He also serves as the Program Coordinator for the New Worshiping Communities Initiative of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. (more…)
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A Letter from Paul to Christians in the U.S.
Michael Gorman, a New Testament scholar whose work I have found to be both insightful and refreshing, has recently published a fictional letter from the Apostle Paul to Christians in the United States in the Christian Century. I heard Gorman present an earlier version of this letter during an address at a theological conference at Northeastern University in Rochester, NY, a couple of years ago, which was subsequently published in the Canadian Theological Review. It is well worth the read. I will be incorporating it into my upcoming Christian Ethics course. You can access it here.
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Forthcoming Issue of Didaskalia
The forthcoming issue of the Canadian theological journal Didaskalia, published by Providence Theological Seminary, includes both a gracious review of my book For the Life of the World: Jesus Christ and the Church in the Theologies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Stanley Hauerwas by Christopher Holmes and an essay of my own entitled, “A Matter of MIssion: Bonhoeffer, the Bible, and Ecclesial Formation.” (more…)
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Kuyper Lecture: “Answering Lesslie Newbigin”
Yesterday, in the midst of a seminar on the life and work of the missiologist Lesslie Newbigin, one of my students directed me to the Kuyper lecture that was recently delivered by the New York City pastor and church planter Tim Keller. Keller’s selection as this year’s Kuyper award winner had previously generated controversy among sections of Princeton’s constituency on account of his affiliation with the Presbyterian Church in America, which holds opposing views from the seminary’s denomination (PCUSA) on the question of the ordination of women and LGBT people. (If you missed the controversy when it broke, you can read a couple of takes on it here or here.) (more…)
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Bodybuilding
A Guest Post by Marian Nacpil
This is the third in a series of posts engaging with the sermons in Leaps of Faith: Sermons from the Edge. This post is a reflection upon a sermon entitled “Bodybuilding,” which was preached to a cohort of pastors and ministry-leaders studying in the MDiv In-Ministry program (now called “Church in the City”) at Tyndale Seminary (pp. 179-188). The Scriptural text for the sermon was Ephesians 4:1-16. (more…)
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Tolkien and the Adventure of Discipleship: Available Online
I recently discovered that my article, “Tolkien and the Adventure of Discipleship: Imaginative Resources for a Missional Ecclesiology,” which appeared a little over a year ago in the Canadian Theological Review, can now be electronically downloaded from the website of the Canadian Evangelical Theological Association. The Canadian Evangelical Theological Association is reorganizing in the new year to form the Canadian-American Theological Association, so it’s unclear how long the article will be available online. So, if you’re interested in reading it, download it now. The full article can be accessed here. (more…)
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“Can These Bones Live?”: The Question Before the Church
I hope to return in the very near future to posting audio from my book launch celebration, as well as to pick up where I left off in my series on Lesslie Newbigin’s “marks of the missional church.” In the meantime, here is a penetrating assessment of the challenge placed before the contemporary church in North America by the “Catholic Baptist” theologian Barry Harvey: (more…)
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Series: Newbigin on “The Call to the Church” – 3. A Declericalized Theology
[This post is the fourth in a series of posts on what could be called “Newbigin’s marks of the missional church” as outlined in his book Foolishness to the Greeks. The previous posts can be found here: introduction, mark #1, mark #2.]
“The missionary encounter with our culture for which I am pleading,” Newbigin writes, “will require the energetic fostering of a declericalized, lay theology.”[1. Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (W.B. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 142.] Upon returning to England after years of missionary service in India, Newbigin observed that theology in the modern West had become largely isolated from the lives and concerns of average Christian men and women. (more…)
