One of the greatest insights of the Google-World is the freedom of Beta. A Beta is more than a product not-yet-ready-for-consumption, but a way of thinking, creating, and living. It owns being unfinished. It expects contribution, evolution, transparency. For a long time all of culture was under a spell. It believed in the [...]

 

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Bruce Epperly is one of the coolest dudes I know.  I had a chat with him about the future of the church, the emerging church, the new shapes of religion and spirituality on the ground, and other theological tid bits.  I hope you enjoy it.  If you do check out his blog series here.

Do you believe in God?  Is it because your brain or genes tells you to?  Is it natural to do so?  Did it serve an important part in our evolution as a species?  Do we need to evolve past it?  Is religious belief a by-product of the structures of our brain?  Would it bother you [...]

Here’s my attempt to stream this conversation.  It should go live right before 2pm on the West Coast.

Here’s Clayton’s Pre-Debate Post \ John gives a super recap \ Philip’s post-debate reflection \ Bob Rhodes reflects on the conversation \ newspaper writeup

Can Daniel Dennett be a public philosopher and engage in a real debate with someone who is both  a philosopher and theist?  Or, will he once again choose to display his rasslin’ rhetorical skills and pass on demonstrating the Apocalyptic fury his intellectual insights are reported to bring?  We will see.
One could call it [...]

The Crazy Texan, Mr. Rick Roderick, has a great grasp of the development of ethics in the west.  If classical virtue ethics were concerned in developing persons with good character, modern ethics became concerned with quantification and instrumentalization.
To understand what I’m talking about, you should listen to this whole series, namely, “Philosophy and Human Values.” [...]

Mr. Tripp sent me an email today with a meme from James McGrath’s blog.  I thought it was a pretty interesting question, namely, by what three religions (other than your own) are you most fascinated.  In what follows, I try to answer as honestly as possible.
With that in mind, I’m mostly interested in the metaphysical and [...]

I’d like to clue those of you who are interested in secularization into a website that’s extremely informative.  It’s a site recording a recent gathering of famous philosophers, including Juergan Habermas,  Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, and Cornel West.  I can’t remeber the occasion of this conference (all that information is on the first recording with [...]

I recently gave a book review for the Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology, 27.2 (Fall 2009). The book I reviewed is called The Open secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology by Alister E. McGrath. For any of you interested in the relationship between the naturalism, natural theology, and the Christian faith, the [...]

Check out this Roderick video on Derrida. He deals, to no small degree, with the quintessential Derrida, namely, the meaning of deconstruction, a term that he understands to signify “housework (see 2:00 in).”
This lecture is still part of Roderick’s Self Under Siege lectures. And what I have realized are the most important points [...]