What man, who's the man, when's a man a man, why's it so hard to be a man?
on Nov 19, 2009 in Catholicism Body Sex Feminism Ecclesiology Tina Beattie is a Catholic feminist and has, accordingly, written a book called New Catholic Feminism. Can you guess what it's about?A lot of 20th century Catholic theology defines femininity in terms of 'active reception', and takes Mary as its mode...

Meet Abélard and Héloïse
on Nov 17, 2009 in Meet... The story of Peter Abélard and Héloïse was considered one of the great love stories by medieval writers, which is funny considering it involves castration, theology, and the monastic life (although I guess you could argue that castration's the bes...

Jokes with Slavoj
on Nov 12, 2009There's an old Jewish joke, loved by Derrida, about a group of Jews in a synagogue, publicly admitting their nullity in the eyes of God. First, a rabbi stands up and says: "O God, I know I am worthless, I am nothing!" After he has finished, a rich bu...

Reading the Bible Ecologically
on Nov 5, 2009 in Bible Environment Elaine Wainwright is a Professor of Theology at the University of Auckland. She argues that, if Christians are to engage seriously with the many ecological issues of our day, that needs to be reflected in our readings of the Bible, and that it's only...

The paradox of marriage
on Nov 3, 2009 in Marriage Farrar Capon I'm up to my eyeballs in more John Milbank at the moment, which combined with a nasty bout of man-flu has left me rather brain-addled, and thus exactly in the mood for the sort of bracing things that Robert Farrar Capon writes. Did I mention that you...

Why Theology Matters (even if you don't understand it)
on Oct 22, 2009I was in a seminar recently, sat next to a guy who worked for a missionary organisation that did work out in Africa. The seminar was pretty academic, and there was plenty of jargon in there about 'discourse' and 'hermeneutics of suspicion.' At the en...

Totem and Taboo Three
on Oct 21, 2009 in Psychoanalysis Freud Sex We've established, then, that Freud thinks that 'primitive' societies can tell us something about the evolution of all human societies, and found out about the totem system which regulates who you are and aren't allowed to sleep with, and has a whole...

Theology and ecology
on Oct 15, 2009 in Bible Environment Paul Eschatology Anthropology Ethics I'm afraid you'll have to wait a little longer for Freud Part III: I was all set to write it up but then I gave blood, and now I'm too woozy and nauseous to think about anything, least of all incest and cannibalism. But! It turns out that today is Bl...

Totem and Taboo Two
on Oct 12, 2009 in Psychoanalysis Freud Sex We've established, then, that Freud thinks that by looking at 'primitive' tribes we can gain important insights about the origins of human culture. In particular, he's interested in societies which are structured by systems of totem because he thinks...

Totem and Taboo
on Oct 7, 2009 in Psychoanalysis Freud Sigmund Freud isn’t a theologian, but he profoundly shaped the way that twentieth-and-twenty-first-century Westerners think about the world, and although scientists tend not to take him very seriously (how would you set up an experiment to test whe...