Friday, August 30, 2013

Cannot Submission Mean Leadership?

After reading this post on the silencing of women in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, a woman in my church made an insightful comment which I've asked her to let me post here:
"One aspect of the discussion which has puzzled me for years is the tacit assumption that women in public ministry are not in submission to their husbands. How can that be assumed? With it [is also] the assumption that no husband would give permission for his wife to minister publicly. That also cannot be assumed."
Rev. Eunice Smith

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Freedom Bound (MLK)

Watching Reverend Martin Luther King Junior's famous "I Have a Dream speech" again today I was struck afresh by one line in particular. At one point the prophet says:

"They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound with our freedom."

The obvious question for race relations fifty years later is: Have we? It remains an important question. But what struck me this time is the significance of that question generally: Do we recognize freedom as a socially "bounded" reality? My freedom is bound up with yours?

It remains an incredibly meaningful speech, chalk full of evocative lines like that one. As I'm sure you know, you can watch the whole thing here:

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Online Introductions to Karl Barth

The thing about Karl Barth is that it's really important for Christians to read him, but it's pretty tough to know how to start. The best advice is just to start. Apart from that, however, thankfully there's an increasing collection of online resources that can help. Here are links to some of both the recently discovered and the more enduring variety.

This weekend over at Die Evangelischen Theologen, W. Travis McMaken's theo-blog round-up included two that I hadn't seen before:

First, for an excellent video introduction to Barth (which you can watch in less than half an hour), check this one out, made by St. John's Nottingham and narrated by Aberdeen's Tom Greggs:

 

Second, at Canon and Creed, Matthew Wilcoxen (a PhD candidate at Charles Stuart University in Sydney, Australia) has begun blogging a Church Dogmatics Paraphrase--which might be just the thing for those that want to delve into the thing but have need of an entry point. If you are going to try to get to know this masterpiece of modern theology, you might as well begin at paragraph one.

Beyond these recent discoveries, of course, there are also a few theo-blog "classics" worth checking out:

If you are looking for a primer on "how to start reading Karl Barth" you still can't do much better than this one by the aforementioned Travis or this one by Darren Sumner at Theology Out of Bounds. 

And last but not least, if you are looking for something even shorter than a paraphrase, there is always Ben Myers' impressive single-sentence encapsulation of each part-volume of the Church Dogmatics, over at Faith and Theology, which you can access here.

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