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David W. Congdon

@dwcongdon

Sep 23, 2018

@Kansas_Press

1. THREAD. I've been an editor in political science at the University Press of Kansas (@Kansas_Press) for over a year now, and ever since I started I've been struck by something: the highly conservative character of the political science field.

2. As someone who spent the last 5 years editing books for an evangelical Christian academic publisher, I can say that working with university press-caliber authors in political science has felt like a lateral move in terms of political culture. It's truly *that* conservative.

3. Indeed in many ways, based on my experience, the political science field is significantly MORE conservative than the field of Christian theologians I worked with previously. This thread documents my quest to understand this phenomenon.

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David W. Congdon

@dwcongdon

Sep 14, 2018

1. Time for a rant thread. There are few things I loathe more than the claim that an interpretation of some beloved classical thinker or text is "biased" or "eisegesis." There's a lot going on in such claims that needs unpacking.

2. First of all, these claims assume the illusion of an unbiased interpretation, as if there is the "real" text or person lying "out there" for everyone to objectively see and admire. This doesn't exist and never has. As Barth says, "there is no exegesis without eisegesis."

3. These charges often falsely appeal to authorial intention ("that author/person wouldn't have authorized this reading"). First, meaning is not exhausted by an author's intentions. Second, attempts to claim what that author would say now are speculative projections.

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David W. Congdon

@dwcongdon

Sep 12, 2018

THREAD. I'm often asked what the point of God-talk is given my thoroughgoing demythologizing approach to theology. Is theology reducible to politics? Is there any meaning to talk of divine action? These are perennial questions, but I have a few thoughts. 1/

This isn't going to be a thread on dialectical or existential theology. I'll simply say that God is an active subject in the sense that I define God as an event, a disruptive occurrence in the midst of life that mobilizes new forms of human existence and social action. 2/

Of course these events can be explained in natural or historical ways, and if the only way we can affirm divine agency is if there are occurrences that we can directly attribute to God and to nothing else, then talk of divine agency is going to be impossible. 3/

Read 13 tweets

David W. Congdon

@dwcongdon

Mar 1, 2018

I believe it's time for me to start my reflections on NT Wright's Gifford Lectures. I'll comment on each lecture after finishing it to simulate live-tweeting. Buckle up, folks. Here we go. #NTWGifford

The opening lecture is titled "The Fallen Shrine: Lisbon 1755 and the Triumph of Epicureanism" and looks at the modern age and how this relates to the study of natural theology & the historical Jesus. It is almost exactly what I expected.

NTW wants to show how modernity is this great atheistic orgy in which God is removed from politics, economics, science, and even Jesus. To make it sound a bit more respectable, he labels everything in modernity "Epicureanism."

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