The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

Cleaning out old stuff I found myself tossing out hundreds of overhead transparencies going back to the late 1980’s. The theological schools where I taught in Malaysia and Singapore were actually very early adapters of this technology. In the 1990’s I had already installed a color network printer at TTC in Singapore for transparencies.  But in 2019 I find there is still resistance among my colleagues in the university to PowerPoint, with all its built-in charts, graphs, and smart art.  They  continue to believe (like a lot of pastors) that  graphics  somehow cheapen the intellectual content of their lectures. Let’s get real.  Possibly the most important leap in pushing forward the intellectual development of humankind was the  graphic.  We moved from the first great leap - the concretization of ideas into words - to the second, the symbolic representation, in letters or pictographs, of those same ideas. Eventually we worked out all kinds of intere...

Back when I was learning German in Vienna the war to the East in the former Yugoslavia was raging. Slobodan Milosevic, who led Serbia in those years was charged with war crimes. As we learned by conversing about politics I opined in German, “Milosevic is evil.” A Serb in the class took exception. “No, he is a criminal” he replied.  I’ve thought about that. He had a point.  We humans don’t have the capacity to judge who is good and evil. Or more properly the judgment I rendered on Slobodan Milosevic is one that could be made of every human being. “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” As soon as we use the language of good and evil for others we have invited and we deserve our own condemnation.  What is within our capacity as humans is to make human laws, set up processes by which we determine who has broken them, and determine the consequences for the criminal. And what we’ve discovered over millennia is that the way to do this is through a democratic...

Matthew 13:52 He said to them,  “Therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.” Perhaps the most dangerous fetish in modern theology is the idea that theology  evolves  toward a more and more exact and true understanding of God and the gospel. In realty contemporary theologians have no more data to work on, no more intelligence to work with, and no more  gifting of the spirit to inspire than their predecessors. Certainly they can avoid the pitfalls and build on the insights of their predecessors. But can they assert that they actually know more about God? It seems unlikely. There is knowledge that is cumulative to be sure. Science offers a good example. Steady investigation of the natural world yields more and more information on which scientists can work, while constant experimentation manipulating both ideas and substances provides new ...

In this post I offer, in it entirety, a sermon preached by Dean Craig Hill at the opening worship service of the Fall Semester at Perkins School of Theology, 2019. Words worthy of contemplation. I highlight one sentence, "Can we possibly be commanded to feel something?" What’s Love Got to Do with It? Feast of Beginnings - August 2019 Texts: Proverbs 27:17; 1 John 4:19-21; Luke 6:27-28, 32-38 Dean Craig Hill The past six months or so have been a tumultuous time, in this country generally and, not least, in the United Methodist Church. They have caused me to reflect a good deal on the character and role of Perkins in such a divisive time. It’s not so much that I have gained new perspective as that I have gained deeper appreciation for and clarity about some things I already believed to be true. Less than a week after becoming dean in July 2016, five police officers were ambushed and killed, and nine others were injured along with two civilians. It happened right here in Dallas....

A recent radio interview featured an author who affirmed he was a Christian. He then went on to say that  religion wasn’t the answer to the problem of the random evil in life and the meaninglessness of the universe . His views are common, and spring from a common failure in religious formation. Too often Christian teaching in the modern era has tried so hard to be honest and open to “the real world” that it has promulgated a lie.  That lie is simple; that the more you accumulate knowledge of the good and the bad, the more different historical facts and anecdotes you assemble, then the more you know about the moral nature of reality. Almost inevitably this uncurated collection of facts leads to the conclusion that evil is random and the universe has no meaning or direction.  The conclusion is nonsense because  the method of randomly assembling “facts” is nonsensical . Reality reveals its nature only when we apply both lenses and filters to the vast inflow of sensory d...

I was in conversation with a web developer and the topic came up of the “good ole days” when a website consisted of HTML code that described actual 2 dimensional pages. Linked to other two dimensional pages. In those days the content of the page (titles, articles, images, videos, links, forms, etc.) was all interwoven with the HTML code that described how it would be displayed. Form and content were intermingled.  Now that has all changed. The mantra of the website developer today is to keep form and content completely separate. Content lives in a multidimensional space as large and complex as the entire internet. Indeed it includes all the content of the internet as well as new content constantly being created. Now form, the “webpage" that you see is a dynamic two dimensional representation of a fraction of the available content. Two dimensional because it has to be shown on a screen. Soon, indeed already if you have the equipment, the form will be in three dimensions. The task o...