New Issue: Theological Variations

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Announcing Our New Issue: Our summer issue is now live. The theme is "Theological Variations," and it includes contributions from Alan Jacobs, John Milbank, Charlie Riggs, and Antón Barba-Kay—as well as other essays from Matt Crawford, Rita Koganzon, Talbot Brewer, Jonathan Malesic, Martha Bayles and many, many others.

The print edition is already hitting mailboxes, if you are a subscriber, expect yours soon. Also, look for the new issue on newsstands at Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and other retailers.

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From the editor: "A growing disenchantment with disenchantment, as we might call the challenge to the once conventional confidence in the inevitable advance of secularism, has radically altered the intellectual terrain of the modern world during the last two or three decades. Not that theology has been restored as the queen of the sciences, but the spiritual, ethical, and metaphysical concerns of theology have regained an academic pertinence that has spread through the humanities and the social and human sciences.

"One reason for this, as theologian John Milbank (one of the contributors to this issue) argued in his seminal work Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1990), is that theological perspectives provide a uniquely peaceable, rigorous, and systematic counterweight to what he believes are the inherently violent and power-oriented suppositions of secular social and political theory. The thematic essays in the current issue reflect some of the concerns of this recent academic recovery of the theological, their topics ranging from the political and historical to the literary and technological."

Continue reading "From the Editor."

From the new issue's theme: Theology's place and purpose in modern life are awkwardly difficult to define and defend. Is it a discipline dedicated to developing and refining genuine knowledge about God? Or is it an expression of the highest ideals and deepest longings of the human experience? In his essay, "The Wages of Estrangement," historian Charlie Riggs reconsiders the life and work of twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich. Tillich developed new, provocative ways of understanding the theological concept of sin. As Riggs argues, Tillich's work owes just as much to his own personal struggles and failings as his struggle with God.

"Sin. What idea could feel hoarier, more anachronistic, more embarrassing? The word itself sounds heavy, ugly, judgmental, needlessly personal—as though the one tagged with it might be expected to burst into flames. Even in a culture that routinely trafficks in harsh moral condemnations, often of a painfully personal nature, sin feels too on the nose. It's not immediately obvious that the word is good for much these days beyond usages that are either titillating (selling sex and chocolate) or intentionally ironic (saying things like 'for my sins').

"Three-quarters of a century ago, the word struck one of the world's leading Protestant theologians in much the same way. In 1948, Paul Tillich openly wondered whether sin had received so many 'distorting connotations' through the centuries, and thereby had 'lost so much of [its] genuine power that we must seriously ask ourselves whether we should use [it] at all, or whether we should discard [it] as useless.' If it were to be salvaged, Tillich thought, sin would need a thoroughgoing reinterpretation."

New Web Feature: Although dialogue between characters is a practical necessity for almost all fiction writers, some particularly excel at putting conversation on the page. As Richard Hughes Gibson, professor of English at Wheaton College, argues in the latest installment of our web series "Critical Miniatures," there is no easy trick to the art of conversation. But sometimes it is best to simply let the characters' words stand on their own.

"Prose fiction has always been at home in the public world, and thus it has always had an ear for conversation. Whether one dates the origins of the novel to the ancient world or to the early modern one, dialogue is there: It is in fiction's DNA. Yet over the centuries, dialogue has taken diverse forms, a fact apparent when one considers the evolution of the fictional page. Though certain typographic strategies now prevail, there has never been one way to distinguish dialogue from narration. Quotation marks became a standard feature in English fiction only during the reign of George III. Samuel Richardson's celebrated Pamela (1742), for example, makes no use of them. Likewise, the setting of speakers' remarks on a series of indented lines (effectively, miniature paragraphs) was a later eighteenth-century development. (Again, Richardson: And he said, I'll do you no harm, Pamela; don't be afraid of me. I said, I won't stay.) Some early modern writers marked off speech attributions with brackets (cried I), while modern writers such as Joyce have employed a dash: —Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit! Others prefer naked text (R.I.P. Cormac McCarthy). Some have made of point of abandoning decorum altogether, as William Faulkner does for stretches of dialogue in The Sound and the Fury that aren't indented and include almost no punctuation: Keep your shirt on I'm not trying to make you tell me anything you dont want to meant no offense…."