POSTS
TheArchive.
A chronological record of essays, thinking tools, and interventions.
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Podcast on Derrida, metaphysics and Reformed theology
Recorded with the Reformed Forum in 2016. In this first of three podcasts I introduce Derrida and debunk the myth that he thinks language is meaningless or that things can mean whatever we want them to mean. I then unpack the famous phrase “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (“there is nothing outside the text”) and the notions of logocentrism
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Diagonalisation: Let the Bible Disrupt Our Culture’s Comfortable Dichotomies
This post originally appeared on The Gospel Coalition Australia. You might have heard the joke about the city-dweller who becomes lost while walking in the countryside and begins to despair of ever finding his way home. He stumbles from field to field, but his eyes light up when he sees a local out walking her
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Excerpt from Thinking Through Creation: Reclaiming the Trinity
“Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the Trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus”. These are the words of Thomas Jefferson, but
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Thinking Through Creation: Introduction
And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.” Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and
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Contents Page for Thinking Through Creation: Genesis 1 and 2 as Tools of Cultural Critique
Here is the contents page for Thinking Through Creation: Genesis 1 and 2 as Tools of Cultural Critique. Foreword by John M. Frame ix Preface xiii Acknowledgements xvii 1. Introduction 1 Listening to the Word Listening to the World The Trinity and Creation: From Embarrassment to Riches 2. Who Created? Thinking
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What is a theological concept? Part 1: Introduction
In this new series of posts I want to ask a question that is simple enough to pose: “what is a theological concept?” The question comes out of lines of inquiry I opened up in Difficult Atheism but wasn’t able to bring to a conclusion, as well as from reflections I have been pursuing since
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Merold Westphal’s Foreword to Jacques Derrida in the P&R Great Thinkers series
If the categorical imperative for civil conversation is “Listen before you speak,” the law for philosophical evaluation is “Understand before you critique.” More than almost any other major twentieth century thinker, Jacques Derrida has been abused by critics who ignore both formulations of the ethics of intellectual debate. For that reason it seems to me
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John Frame’s Foreword to Thinking Through Creation
I am honoured that John M. Frame has agreed to write the Foreword to Thinking Through Creation, which I reprint here in full. Readers who approach this book with a background in Reformed and presuppositional thought will find much that is familiar here. Watkin ably argues the proposition that Scripture presents not only a way of
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The joys of being a paleolibricist
Do you need a mental detox from the glucose rush of today’s self-help inspired “how to…” Christian books? Longing for something meaty, a nutrition technology that releases its mental nutrients gradually and satisfies for longer? Then C. S. Lewis has just the diet for you. You need to become a paleolibricist! First of all, paleolibricism is
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Do you want to be subversively counter-cultural? Then read old books
In this gem of an exchange, James Houston talks about his desire “in the middle years of life” to be counter-cultural, and the way in which spiritual classics allow us to enter the culture of another period and see our own culture somewhat from the outside: If you want to think more about this issue,