Weekly Roundup #5
January 5, 2024
Happy New Year from the Barth Center! As we enter into 2024, I am excited to share with you the following articles that we released over the past week: Ed Watson’s reflections on whether or not we still need theologians for our time today, Nancy Duff’s search for God in a liberal arts education, and Maxine King’s review of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and its colonial themes. I hope you enjoy them!
— Yanan Melo
God Here & Now is the online magazine of the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary
Ed Watson, What Use Are Theologians?: Whether our reflection on the shared life of God and creature takes place in the academy, the church, or any other stream of life, whether this reflection involves academic study or not, theologians do learn. We gain knowledge, and if we are lucky, this knowledge brings us closer to God. Before this knowledge empowers us to speak, however, it should empower us to listen. It should empower us to listen to the depths and the density of what our neighbor is saying, to hear how the body’s words express the spirit’s life. Theological learning can help to form a sensitivity to the truths one’s neighbor already has, to the truth being created out of those truths, to how these truths compel movement through life and its vicissitudes.
Nancy Duff, Shakespeare vs. STEM: When examining a new scientific breakthrough, such as the cloning of an adult sheep, Christians need to understand the facts of that breakthrough before making pronouncements regarding its morality. According to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a wise person "will seek to obtain the greatest possible information about the course of events," but without becoming wholly dependent on factual knowledge. Wisdom requires us to recognize "the significant within the factual" as we seek to look into "the depth of things."
Maxine King, Scorsese’s Settler Gaze: Killers of the Flower Moon is a horrifying story; and for those of us living in the ongoing aftermath of North American settler colonialism, it is our horrifying story... God's solidarity with the oppressed in Jesus Christ is beyond all colonial limits of identification that are on display in the content and form of Killers of the Flower Moon. Any truly theological perspective—in film, theology, or otherwise—will instead begin with God and God's radical solidarity with Mollie, the Osage, and all the disinherited of the world, thus, with the alternative ways of being and living that this incarnate tradition of the oppressed teaches.
Can Wiccans and Evangelicals become friends? Yes, says this article. Check out these award-winning 2023 releases from Duke University Press. Read about how a “Compost Christianity” is being plowed in the rural south. A debut poetry collection from third-culture poet Kristina Erny on mystery and the ordinary. Japanese American artist Makoto Fujimura reflects on the possibility of “culture care as an antidote to culture wars.” How does poet Christian Wiman keep his faith after years of battling cancer and facing his own despair? When the magi visited the newborn Jesus, what might separate myth from history, or are they more entangled than we think them to be? A cultural analyst engages the challenges that face filmmakers who make movies about the Holocaust, just as director Jonathan Glazer did with his recent film The Zone of Interest.
God Here and Now is an online magazine and newsletter from the Center for Barth Studies. If you would like to support our work, you can donate to the center here. All donations are tax-deductible. Questions? Ideas? Email us: barth.center@ptsem.edu
