Forging Ploughshares

By Paul AxtonReligion & Spirituality Christianity

Forging Ploughshares episodes

September 07 Anthony Bartlett: The Hebrew Exodus from Violence
Anthony Bartlett provides a Girardian reading of Genesis and Exodus, in which the Hebrew people are formed from oppressed outcasts, and in which liberation from violence and oppression, through the experience of Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, and the experience of Abraham, provides for the formation of the nonviolence pictured in creation and culminating in Christ.
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1 hr 49 min
September 05 Sermon: The Crisis of Mediation Leading to the Intimate Mediation of Faith
Paul Axton preaches: There is an apocalyptic logic laid out in the New Testament, which the Lutheran notion of justification misses, in which there is a crisis and implosion, an attempt to silence God, and it is from the midst of this attempt to destroy him that Christ speaks.
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39 min
August 31 Anthony Bartlett on the Significance of Benoît Chantre for Girardian Theory
Anthony Bartlett explains to Brad and Paul the significance of Benoît Chantre, the biographer and last key conversation partner with René Girard with whom the book Battling to the End, Girard's last word. Chantre attempts to direct Girard away from a dark apocalypticism toward what he calls an intimate mediation in Christ.
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1 hr 39 min
August 29 Sermon: Redefining Luther’s “Justification” Through a Fuller Reading of Paul
Paul Axton preaches: Paul describes the "end of the law" which is "nailed to the cross" and "set aside" along with the power of the "rulers and authorities" so that a fulness of Paul's reading gets beyond Luther's constricted understanding of grace and faith which are still functioning on the basis of the law.
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39 min
August 24 Žižek’s Psychotheological Extension of Girard’s Anti-Sacrificial Reading of Paul
Brad and Paul discuss how Slavoj Žižek Extends the insights of René Girard, providing a deep reading of the problem of the law, accounting for Luther's depression, in spite of his discovery of "justification."
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56 min
August 22 Sermon: The Passage from Dying In to Dying To the Law
Brad and Paul discuss the sermon that follows, showing that the Lutheran connection between Paul and the Law, often portrayed in a Lutheran-like conversion, misconstrues Judaism and the Law, and missed the apocalyptic failure and salvation Paul is portraying.
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44 min
August 17 Love's Entanglement with Anthony Bartlett
Anthony Bartlett explains to Paul and Brad the culmination of his work in Love's Entanglement: God as Nonviolent Relation and How That Brings the World to Peace.
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56 min
August 15 Sermon: Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the End of Sacrificial Religion
Paul Axton preaches: This sermon follows the sacrificial stages in the life of Harry Truman as a prototype of the seeming necessity of the apocalyptic religion into which Christ intervenes.
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38 min
August 10 Sermon: Knowing God and the World Through Christ
Paul Axton preaches: Jesus claim to Thomas and Philip that they can see and know God in him, that he is the way and the truth and the life, call for a holistic understanding which has been disrupted by modernism but which is approached through Sophiology.
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38 min
August 08 Hiroshima and the Exposure of the Scapegoating Mechanism with Anthony Bartlett
Anthony Bartlett and Brad and Paul discuss the dropping of the bombs on Japan in light of the Girardian insight into the scapegoating mechanism, and Girard's turn from total condemnation of sacrifice due to the influence of Raymund Schwager, and the entry of Peter Thiel and JD Vance.
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1 hr 27 min