Forging Ploughshares

Brad and Paul discuss the work of William Desmond and approach it through his engagement with Hegel, his reading of Flannery O'Connor, and his opposition to the dark reading of Slavoj Žižek.

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Paul Axton preaches: Thomas is a resolute unbeliever who after examining Jesus' wound gives the strongest of affirmations of Jesus' divine identity. As in the story of Flannery O'Connor, Revelation, one world falls apart revealing another. The crack opens up to let in the light. 

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Brad and Paul continue the conversation with John Ashworth, who has spent much of his life in Sudan in practical peacemaking efforts and describes how nonviolence is the real-world solution to conflict. 

(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace”: This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. We will examine va...

Paul Axton preaches: John combines his description of love and God with his picture of its reversal in the Antichrist. Friedrich Nietzsche, in recommending the Antichrist and his work (a recommendation taken up by the Nazis) depicts the reversal embraced by a German and American Christianity which would hate in the name of Christ. Agape love is the only counter to this demonic form of the faith.

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Brad and Paul interview peacemaker John Ashworth, who has spent his life bringing peace to Sudan, long torn by ethnic and political violence. John has been key in negotiating peace settlements and bringing peace to this troubled region and his expertise with the realities of peace as the resolution to violence is grounded in real-world reality and experience. 

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Paul Axton preaches: The slaying of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the justification of this slaughter and its denial points us to Christ's exposure of the blind murderers who killed him in the name of law and order. Beyond this evil, there is a third tier of evil which acknowledges Christ's exposure of evil but which is now using this insight to manipulate the blind. 

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Brad and Paul, so as to explain recent blogs and podcasts, discuss Hegel's Logic as it applies to the quantum reality and theory of David Bohm and which describes how it is that Christ unifies all things, bringing together mind and matter through the understanding that thought or cognition is ultimate reality. Paul's depiction of two kinds of letter is the point of entry.

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Ethan Vanderleek, a specialist on William Desmond describes to Paul, Desmond's project and its overlap with the Christology of Rowan Williams. William Desmond is one of our most important living philosophers, and Ethan explains how he poses a true metaphysical alternative to both modernism and postmodernism.

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Paul Axton preaches: The living letters brings together embodiment and meaning in the particulars of incarnation, and this is reflected in quantum mechanics and modern biology as discussed by David Bohm and Rupert Sheldrake. The letter that kills is on the order of a materialism which empties out meaning from embodiment.

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Paul Axton preaches: Corinthians says, "you are a letter of Christ" and this living letter resolves the problem of the letter or language that is deadly. The resolution between the difference between God and Creation, subject and object, or all seemingly unbridgeable differences inherent to language, psychology, philosophy, and law (summed up as "the letter that kills") are bridged in the living letter, or what Maximus calls the lo...

In this continued discussion of how the Constantinian shift impacted Christianity, Nate, Karl, Jim, Andrew and Paul, discuss the loss of non-violence, the turn from Christian ethics and the Sermon on the Mount, the turn to violent atonement, and the shift in the conception of authority and the church. A different "common sense" arose that pervaded every area of life so as to displace the uniqueness of Christian identity.

Paul Axton preaches, describing the transformed mind, or knowing God as the suspension of the common Jewish and Enlightenment notion of God and, recognized by Hegel. Paul's suspension of the law and Hegel's negation of the negation as the displacement of a mediated notion of God and direct knowing in Christ, are making the same argument about the necessity to cease believing in the God of the law so as to believe in the Father of C...

In this discussion of how it is that Christianity became a religion, much like other religions, Paul, Nat, Jim, Andrew and Karl, discuss the impact of the Constantinian shift, the rise of Divine Satisfaction, the turn to a closed understanding of the world, and the relinquishing of the revolutionary nature of the faith. 

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Paul Axton preaches: The theme of Mathew captured in Immanuel, is completed in the Lord's Supper, in which the efficacious presence of God is made to bear on the lives of believers in what Hegel calls "actualized Christian Freedom." There is freedom from the violence of blood spilled in the taking up of the blood of Christ in the life of believers. 

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