On Being a Christian Philosopher

Throughout the past weeks I have had a certain theme (or perhaps question) on my mind: the relationship between Christian faith and philosophy. This question has roots in an ever broader (perennial) question, which concerns the relationship between reason and revelation (or as Tertullian put it: “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?”). As many [...]

Thank You John Milbank (Or, Why I Am Returning to Augustine)

While working through John Milbank’s essay “Augustine and the Indo-European Soul,” I came across a paragraph that “confirmed” for me the proper relationship between philosophy and theology, and also the proper relationship between myself and St. Augustine. Milbank writes:
For Augustine, the objectifying gaze of philosophy without love produces no truth, but merely satisfies a perverse [...]

Transubstantiation and Language

Recently I have been picking up more literature from my favorite theological movement – Radical Orthodoxy. Catherine Pickstock, an RO theologian who will never cease to impress me with her rich prose and audacious claims, once again challenged me at the core of my Christian faith. While reading her essay, “Necrophilia: The Middle of Modernity, [...]

The Secret: Where Capitalism Meets Metaphysics

I just viewed the free 20 minute version of “The Secret” because I wanted to make sure that the entire movie would be worth purchasing; after only seconds I realized that this film does not even deserve to be purchased. Apparently “The Secret” is not supposed to be a comedy, but I that didn’t [...]

Sickness and Death in the Anthropology of Capitalism

Towards the closing of Stanley Hauerwas’ work, A Better Hope, my attention was grasped a short chapter on sickness and death. Hauerwas provoked me to consider why our Western construal of death so often discloses a desire for a quick and painless death. We desire a quick death to avoid consciousness of what is [...]