A Sound of Sheer Silence

" This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all." (1 John 1:5). 1. For those of you who are not nerds, or at least a certain sort of nerd, allow me to give you a brief primer on Warhammer . Warhammer  first came into existence as Warhammer Fantasy Battle , which is a tactical war game set in a medieval fantasy world using painted miniatures published by Games Workshop, a British game company.  The original miniatures game expanded into tabletop RPGs, video games, and other media, as well as the derivative Warhammer 40k,  which is basically Warhammer  in space (and, if anything, is even more popular and well known than the original fantasy version). But Warhammer is best known for being the origin point for the term "grimdark," which was derived from the original tag-line for Warhammer 40k --"In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war."  "Grimdark"...

A week or so ago, I got a message on Twitter from my Twitter friend "Egregious Philbin," asking me for my thoughts on an pair of articles from J. R. Daniel Kirk, entitled "Colonizing Biblical Interpretation" and "Oedipus Text: Canon, Creed, and Post-Colonized Interpretation."   They are both interesting articles, and I have wanted to write about them for a while, but I wanted to finish the post on the Cult of Victimhood before turning to these articles (for reasons that will become clear in a moment). I should say that I have enjoy listening to and reading Kirk, especially during his appearances on the Homebrewed Christianity  podcast.  I have also said how I often feel like I have more in common with progressive Evangelicals than I do with conservative Catholics .  Reading these posts, however, was a reminder that this is not always the case, as it immediately brought out the "high church" part of my Christian DNA.  To me, these posts show t...

1.  Many years ago, I read a book by Karen Armstrong entitled The Battle for God .  In the book, Armstrong tries to define and explore the concept of "fundamentalism."  Technically, fundamentalism refers to a specific movement in Protestant Christianity, stemming from the Niagara Bible Conference in the 1880s and 1890s that defined what it believed to be the "five fundamentals" of Christian faith.  However, the term "fundamentalism" has expanded to other religious contexts, so we talk about Islamic Fundamentalism, Jewish Fundamentalism, etc.  In fact, in her book, Armstrong discusses the history of Jewish, Islamic and (Protestant) Christian fundamentalisms in parallel. But what is fundamentalism?  Armstrong argues that it has three basic components--a substantive component, a political or social component, and a rhetorical component.  The substantive component is a whole-cloth rejection of the values of the broader society in which it finds itself--i...