Theology Nerd Throwdown

We started with alt-blonde beards, the Lakers selling for $12.5 billion, and the gambling apps that will call you with Super Bowl tickets when you lose your year's income and cancel your account when you win. Then Bo told the story of the four-clergy ministerium in Twin Falls discovering that none of them use the same words for the same things — vestry, deacon, elder, narthex...

Bo listened to last week's Jamie Smith conversation and came back this Friday with a follow-up on his own — Jamie has been Bo's favorite frenemy for a decade, and the dark-night processing changed the conversation in ways Bo did not see coming. Which turned out to be the perfect on-ramp for the actual topic of the hour: Byung-Chul Han, the Korean-German philosopher I have bee...

Bo had a week. So did I. He is running a plumber-exterminator-HVAC gauntlet and moving eighteen pews for the new community center. I flew across the country for the funeral of one of my best friends from div school. We came back to the table anyway. What we got is one of the wildest, most tangent-heavy TNTs of the year: Bo listening to the audiobook history of the New Apostol...

Bo drives this week. He has spent seven days chewing on Kevin Carnahan's visit — the America 1940s–1980s was a mirage argument — and comes back with a run of philosophical frames he wants to test. Walter Benjamin's Angel of History (the 1940 essay on the Klee painting where the angel is being blown backward into the future by a storm called progress...

Bo is back from fishing (tight lines). Kevin Carnahan is back at the table. And the subject is Kevin's lecture at the Theology Summit, whose central claim is that America was never actually good. The moral America a lot of us grew up thinking existed from the 1940s to the 1980s was a mirage. World War II made us construct ourselves as anti-Nazi. The Great Depression ...