faithasawayoflife

unpacking

Here's some pics of my new office, 320F Northwestern, at Luther Seminary. 

We've been unpacking at our house since Saturday and have made huge progress there, and today  I had a chance to get after the boxes in my office.  So nice to find old friends (like Alfred North Whitehead's 1926 Lowell Lectures, Religion in the Making, in the original Macmillan 1926 hardback edition from my teacher James M. Gustafson's library (it has his marginalia  throughout)) and new ones (like Slavoj Zizek's The Fragil Absolute--or, why is the christian legacy worth fighting for? (along with a helpful overview of this and a number of Zizek's recent publications by Ashley Woodiwiss in Books & Culture)). 
Here's one more from the office.
Peace,
Chris

Angels: a pop culture facination theologians are ducking?

Are theologians ducking the once-obligatory study of angels?  While my friend Kelton Cobb was here at Holden teaching on pop culture and faith--the subject of his fine book--I had the thought that even though angels are everywhere in popular culture and religious imagination, they seem to have fallen off the list of subjects getting serious treatment from theologians.  I can easily think of pop songs, movies, and tv shows, along with lots of gift store cards and stautettes of angels. On the book front,  I haven't done a careful bibliographic search, but a check of our library here at Holden offered a recent book by Billy Graham (not serious theology) and a 1957 book by Jean Danielou, S. J. called The Angels and Their Mission According to the Fathers of the Church.  It is lovely, short, and comprehensive.  He states that even in the 1950s when he wrote the subject was already falling out of favor among theologians.  He argues that when angels are raised, and that is not often, it is either treated as a personification of psychological realities or a heretical spiritualism, and neither is an acceptable conclusion from a Christian perspective.  This in the introduction.  Then he moves to discuss a series of topics drawing on the thought of the church fathers (more or less up to Aquinas, to whom he gives highest praise for his discussion of angels in the Summa Theologica). 

What would be really interesting is to see a practical theologian with a lively sense of contemporary discipleship, media, and theological depth write on this topic.  What are the ways angels 'show up' in contemporary culture, and what meaning to people give to them?  What has the Scripture and tradition to say regarding angels and how has this teaching shifted across the centuries?  And what might we say about faithful discipleship today, about God's work in the world, and about the specific role angels play in that?  This has to connect to preaching and worship, but much more, too.  Hmm.  I wish I had time for this one--perhaps a project for a laboratory in practical theology!
Peace,
Chris