Why has the future tense come to displace the present in certain renditions of the Words of Institution? “This is my body which will be given up for you”? Weak tea, I say. Count me firmly in the camp of “This is my body which is given up (or, better,
This world of ours is obviously a strange mix of good and evil. There is astonishing and inspiring balance, harmony, vision, and beauty on display alongside devastating and utterly irrational suffering, loss, blindness, and incompletion. So much is left unseen and unfinished in every moment, and yet every moment also
This reflection is a fool’s mission, but it seems absurd not to make an attempt at describing this season of Holy Week. Our priest reminds us to keep silent this Holy Saturday as Christ is in the tomb, but these thoughts reach for nothing and contain no conclusions. They
Note: this was taken from an informal, online share by David Armstrong and posted with his permission. The charge nailed above Jesus’s head was “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Jesus was crucified, a Roman method of execution reserved for seditionists and insurrectionists. Jesus is remembered in all
David Bentley Hart tells the story of a tree that he saw shaking with laughter and that sent him running away in fear as a boy of about seventeen. This is from “A Conversation Between Salley Vickers and David Bentley Hart” posted to Leaves in the Wind on November 7,
I’m only responding fifteen years late, but Christopher Southgate’s book The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil (Westminster John Knox Press, 2008) was moving to me with its rare level of concern for animal suffering. It is a profoundly thoughtful book with many insights
On his Leaves in the Wind newsletter, David Bentley Hart recently posted a video chat with the essayist Ed Simon, in part because Hart so admired Simon’s book Binding the Ghost: Theology, Mystery, and the Transcendence of Literature the last chapter which (“Binding the Ghost: On the Physicality of
There is no truth or value that imposes itself to which we ever manage to appeal in perfect abstraction from experiences and traditions given social life by human beings in just such and such a manner that they could not have foreseen or intended from the outset. A pure rational
My online friend, Maurice Mo Hagar II, recently passed a question along to me and several others. He first pointed to this example: If universal salvation is true, what’s the point of being Christian, of believing in Christ, getting baptized, belonging to the church… preaching the gospel, teaching the
We’re oddly ambivalent now about not whether a man is permitted to kill himself but the manner and place of it. Tobacco, no; euthanasia, yes. He must do it through rationalized institutions at the hands of an expert and not his own passions; out of sight unless he be
Dear reader, I have transcribed below a good bit that David Bentley Hart had to say recently about spiritual versus fleshly bodies in an interview with Larry Chapp from October 10, 2022. These points by Hart (that he has made many times and in many ways) are extremely confusing to
My five year old daughter speaks with reverence about a “family tradition” involving the two of us walking down the Greenbelt trail near our home to The Tiger Eye coffeeshop where she loves to get a small cotton candy ice cream. It’s hardly a family tradition as we’ve