It has been a month and a half, actually, since the last link post. I’m an academic, and it was summer. Not that I wasn’t working: I was chained to my desk by what are still relatively new administrative responsibilities. But I had to have a summer somehow, and going on something of a semi-formal blog hiatus was it. DET is back up and running, however, and you can expect the usual steady stream of posts. And we even managed to pile up some good stuff while on hiatus! Be sure to check up on anything you missed while enjoying the summer.
The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Edited and introduced by Isabel Best. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012.
On the last day of his life, Dietrich Bonhoeffer preached a sermon. In his lifetime Bonhoeffer was respected as a theologian and a teacher, a great mind who would surely leave a mark on Christendom. We in the twenty-first century recognize him as a Christian martyr to the evils of Nazidom. Above all other things, Bonhoeffer thought of himself as a pastor and a preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer held tightly to the Christ who brought victory over Death and Sin and who remains "the living Lord who meets me" (208).
I cannot speak for all religion professors, of course. And I’m sure that there are places where this “narrative” holds sway even more than at my institution (pictured is Butler Hall, the seat of the Lindenwood School of Humanities with its Religion department). Nonetheless, I often get the sense that in higher education today and in public consciousness (to the extent that the public these days can be said to be conscious…), the discipline of religious studies is met with something like polite incredulity about its meaningfulness. Indeed, sometimes this incredulity is far from polite. Like the humanities tradition in general, religious studies often seems to be backed into a corner and asked to justify its continued existence and consumption of relatively very modest resources in today’s universities.
Karl Barth, an annihilationist? A recent Twitter "conference"
And then things really got going. Enjoy this recap!
In this expansive (or, as some might read it, interminable) series of posts commemorating DET's ninth birthday, we have highlighted one post from the past for each of the nine years we've been in publication. Recall that Facebook was only just catching on in 2006, so we made it in just under the wire -- right before the social media began the rapid process of subsuming all pubic discourse.
In my previous post we saw that the true spirit of theo-bloggery thrives only in community. At some level, despite ideological differences and vocational rivalries, we live and move within a web or tapestry of threads as emotional, visceral and intense as the dedicated cadre of fans that cluster in musty gyms to enjoy roller derby. I want to (finally) conclude this series by reflecting on the power of community, solidarity, collaboration and pedagogically trendy stuff like that.
In my previous post, to mark the ninth birthday of this blog, I proposed to essay a kind of phenomenological account of what makes Die Evangelischen Theologen tick by revisiting nine representative posts, one each for each year of operation. The operative theory is this: If the indivisible eternal suffuses each discrete moment of finite existence, then it follows that each of these posts should offer a sort of microcosm for the whole. Upper management decreed this nine-lives concept should be stretched out (milked) over three separate posts. I'll leave it to you, gentle readers, to decide whether that was a good idea.