Queen of the Sciences

The meek shall inherit the earth... or maybe the land. And if the land, which land—the land of Israel, to be exact? In this episode Dad and I admit to lacking anything like a robust theology of the land of Israel for today, despite being rather more theologically robust on this topic when it comes to the biblical writings, as well as having some political convictions about the current state of secular affairs. But do we need to have an active theology of the land of Israel today? To guide us through, we turn to studies by, on the one hand, a Messianic Jewish theologian, and, on the other, a Palestinian Lutheran theologian, and wrestle our way to a conclusion that is guaranteed to satisfy nobody. That's what we're here for.

Notes:

1. Dad's commentary on Joshua

2. My moonlighting on Fresh Text to talk about Psalm 37

3. Article 17 of the Augsburg Confession

4. Kinzer, Jerusalem Crucified, Jerusalem Risen

5. Isaac, From Land to Lands, from Eden to the Renewed Earth

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This episode started out as an experimental bonus: I asked Dad to think through with me what it can mean to bear witness in these days when a) everything sounds like propaganda, b) public and private are endlessly confused but I'm unwilling to expose to public scrutiny matters that are relevant to public discourse yet intrinisically private, and c) rebuttal and critique automatically vault the rebutted into martyr status. In other words, is it even possible to say truthful things in public anymore? Listen in for our provisional answers.

Notes:

1. Related episodes: Theology and Experience 1, Theology and Experience 2, James

2. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

3. MacLuhan, The Medium Is the Message (beats me why this is spelled everywhere on Amazon, even the book covers, as "Massage" instead of "Message")

4. Weiss, "Hurts So Good"

5. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self

6. Augustine, Confessions (current favorite translation)

7. Merton, Seven Storey Mountain

8. My "apocalyptic parables": Pearly Gates and Protons and Fleurons

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If everything's postmodern, then nothing's postmodern. In fact, according to Dad, postmodernism is actually just modernism continued by other means. Perplexed yet? No worries, that's part of the plan. If you can't conquer the body, then conquer the soul, and the rest will follow. In this episode we sort out postmodernism and its doppelgänger, then explore ways to keep sane and whole amidst the insanity. Surprisingly, I give words of hope, encouragement, and peace. So listen in just for that surprising development!

Notes:

1. Related episodes: Critical Social Theory, Pragmatism, Hannah Arendt, What Is a Person?, Cybertech and Personhood, Bonhoeffer's Life Together, Powers and Principalities

2. Nelson, "The Convening Power of the Pastor," Lutheran Forum 51/1 (2017): 50–51.

3. ed. Helmer, Truth-Telling and Other Ecclesial Practices of Resistance, including Dad's "Complicity and the Christological Path of Ecclesial Resistance"

4. eds. Stjerna and Thompson, On the Apocalyptic and Human Agency: Conversations with Augustine of Hippo and Martin Luther, with Dad's “Augustine, Luther and the Critique of the Sovereign Self”

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Miracles seem like straightforward things to define, if rare to experience, until you start to think about the topic more deeply. In this episode, Dad and I discuss C. S. Lewis's book Miracles, the danger of accepting the definition of miracle as "violation of natural processes," what the Creator has to do with the Redeemer, how prayer affects providence, and biblical ambivalence about miracles.

Notes:

1. Lewis, Miracles

2. Related episodes: Illness and Healing, Revival and Renewal with the Blumhardts, Nenilava Prophetess of Madagascar

Do you rejoice every other Tuesday to see a new Queen of the Sciences episode appear? Then consider supporting us on Patreon. You can start at just $2 a month; more gets you swag. Or just pay us a visit at sarahhinlickywilson.com and paulhinlicky.com!

Already in our first year of podcasting we expressed sympathy with Bonhoeffer's view that the time was coming when faith would need to come to the aid of reason. Three and a half years later, it seems even more acute than that: faith to the aid of science! In this episode we discuss scientific reasoning as an extremely valuable form of reason that nevertheless, like all human forms of reasoning, is subject to both limitations and distortions, not to mention exploitation in the service of authoritarianism. Then Dad walks us through the difference between a worldview and a Godview, why a change in the former makes people feel that they're losing the latter, and what is resilient about a Godview as science continues its necessary task of questioning and challenging received knowledge.

Notes:

1. Have a listen to our previous episodes Faith to the Aid of Reason and The Empiricists Strike Back

2. Knoll, A Brief History of the Earth

3. In Dad's Beloved Community, see the discussion of "creation faith and the scientific understanding of nature" (pp. 735–640), and see also his article "Retrieving Luther on Prayer: Spirituality in the Production of Christian Doctrine" in The T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Prayer

Do you rejoice every other Tuesday to see a new Queen of the Sciences episode appear? Then consider supporting us on Patreon. You can start at just $2 a month; more gets you swag. Or just pay us a visit at sarahhinlickywilson.com and paulhinlicky.com!

Hegel was our first family dog, which probably tells you all you need to know about our family. Before that, Hegel was a German philosopher, famously one of the most impenetrable, and yet weirdly influential for all that. In this episode, Dad shines a light in the fog. Don't worry if you come to this topic with nothing but Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis. I didn't either, but it all made sense in the end. Kind of.

Notes:

1. Related Episodes: St. Paul Among the Philosophers, Critical Social Theory

2. See Dad’s Divine Simplicity and Divine Complexity; plus, with his colleague Adkins, Rethinking Philosophy and Theology with Deleuze

3. Adkins, Death and Desire in Hegel, Heidegger and Deleuze

4. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion

5. Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel

6. O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel

7. Moltmann, The Crucified God

8. Agamben, The Time That Remains

9. Žižek and Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ

10. Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy

11. Małysz, "Hegel's Conception of God and its Application by Isaak Dorner to the Problem of Divine Immutability," Pro Ecclesia XV:4 (2006): 448-471

Yikes. You know the end is nigh when a couple of Lutheran theologians produce an episode on James longer than the one they did on Romans. In this episode, we first sort out what Luther did and didn't say about James, "epistle of straw," clearing up a lot of misapprehensions and faulty inferences, but either way we strongly suggest that the rest of the history of interpretation of James need not be controlled by a few remarks of the reformer early in his career.

From there, we discuss at length why there is so little plainly said about Jesus in this five-chapter letter—though there is a lot about God the Father, and there's no Father without a Son! We also argue that Paul and James really were addressing different errors in their respective discussions of faith and works, so pitting them against each other is neither exegetically nor spiritually illuminating.

All right, let's just admit it: we both like this book. You should, too.

Notes:

1. If you insist on making Luther's comments continue to determine the course of James interpretation, you can find them in Luther's Works vol. 35.

2. The other podcasts I mentioned are Fresh Text and The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.

3. Other relevant episodes from us are: How to Hack the Law, Justification by Faith, Faith to the Aid of Reason, The Certainty of Faith, Justification by Faith Revisited, and Faith. Just Faith.

4. L. T. Johnson, The Letter of James

5. If you enjoy Woe-itudes, check this out

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After three and a half years of dropping not-so-subtle hints, Dad finally persuaded me to read Reinhold Niebuhr's The Nature and Destiny of Man... though in this episode we cover only vol. 1, the "Nature" part. (Jump ahead to the end of Season 7 for vol. 2!) In this episode we examine Niebuhr's sweeping summation of Western intellectual history and whether it holds up to scrutiny, how the divorce of Renaissance and Reformation gave us all the intractable problems of modernity, the difference between universal sin and unequal guilt, and zero in on the one place where Niebuhr talks more about God than man.

Notes:

1. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man; see also his Moral Man and Immoral Society

2. James, Varieties of Religious Experience

3. Related episodes: Hannah Arendt, On Putin's Invasion of Ukraine

Do you rejoice every other Tuesday to see a new Queen of the Sciences episode appear? Then consider supporting us on Patreon. You can start at just $2 a month; more gets you swag. Or just pay us a visit at sarahhinlickywilson.com and paulhinlicky.com!

Robots are not people, information does not want to be free, and the internet has no consciousness of its own. Meanwhile, human society trades on outrage and no one can tell what is true and what is false. Among the many enduring themes of human experience is how we create tools that in turn re-create us, and the past couple decades are only an accelerated and amplified version of that. With the help of tech critic Jaron Lanier, in this episode Dad and I explore the roots of how the whole world has gone mad, what it means to be and remain a person in the midst of it, and the urgency of doing so. Otherwise, "those who make them become like them," as Psalm 135 puts it.

Notes:

1. All of Lanier's books are highly recommended: You Are Not a Gadget, Who Owns the Future?, and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.

2. Scott, Seeing Like a State

3. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

4. Asimov, "Robbie," in I, Robot

5. For more on this topic, see my blog post "Quitting Facebook... Again," our previous QotS episodes What Is a Person? and How to Hack the Law, and my new podcast with my husband Andrew, The Disentanglement Podcast, with explanations of digital tech and practical tips for getting free of its tentacles.

Do you rejoice every other Tuesday to see a new Queen of the Sciences episode appear? Then consider supporting us on Patreon. You can start at just $2 a month; more gets you swag. Or just pay us a visit at sarahhinlickywilson.com and paulhinlicky.com!