Religion

Religion is one of those things that, depending on who you are, can mean almost anything. It’s simultaneously so personal and so broad that it feels almost impossible to talk about.

Here, we make a start, chipping away at that unending challenge. We talk here about the stories of religion – the stories that we tell ourselves and each other about where we’re from, and what life means. We talk about the stories that shape the lives of believers all around the globe.

Check out some of the quick-start topics below, or scroll down for the most recent – updates every second Wednesday.

On Now: 20th-C Protestants

Protestant thinkers from across the 20th century

What were they up to?

The Big Four

Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin

On the shoulders of giants

By author

All the texts we’ve discussed, listed by author

Alphabetical!

Most recent:

Niebuhr: The Awful Society

Here’s a question. What’s the arc of society? Are things getting better, or worse? Not even just in this specific moment – let’s zoom out a little more than that – what range of possible futures is open to us? Regardless of whether things might be relatively up or down this decade, or even in…

Niebuhr: The Church and the State

In his 1929 book The Social Sources of Denominationalism, H. Richard Niebuhr explores how the nature of the church is informed by its relationship to the state. You probably know in the early days of Christianity, the church was persecuted by Roman authorities. By the early fourth century, things had changed: we have the emperor…

Niebuhr: On the Middle Class Church

We’re shifting this week to H. Richard Niebuhr’s 1929 book The Social Sources of Denominationalism. Niebuhr was an American professor of Christian ethics in the 20th century, and this book deals with – I guess with the sociology of religion. It’s about where different denominations come from, and why they continue to exist. We’ve talked…

Niebuhr: The Responsible Self

Here’s a cool idea. We’re dealing in 2023 with 20th century Protestant writers, and we’re starting – we’ve started – with H. Richard Niebuhr, an American professor of Christian ethics. We looked through the latter half of 2022 at Niebuhr’s most famous work, Christ and Culture, and we’re starting now with his posthumously published work,…

Ellul: Serving God and the World

Most of the Christians I went through college with trained as doctors, lawyers, or teachers – all very practical roles where they could contribute to the public good in a tangible, visible way. That’s something they felt compelled by. They were good Christians, and they wanted to help people, so they studied for jobs with…

Niebuhr: On Society and Unity

“Society itself is an expression of the desire of the many for oneness; its ills are all forms of dissension; peace is another name for social health.” We’ve been talking – wow, since September – about H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture. I don’t want to give too much background or context on the book;…

Niebuhr: On Religious Difference

We’ve been talking over the past few weeks about Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, a 1951 text about the different ways of navigating the relationship between Christ and the world, or Christ and culture. Niebuhr explores all these different ways of articulating that relationship, of figuring out how to work the balance between these different…

Niebuhr: On Belonging

So we’ve been looking over the past few weeks at Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (Niebuhr: On Christ and Culture). I won’t go over the basic argument of the book again, except to say that it’s about how believers understand and manage the relationship between Jesus and the culture around them. Throughout the book, Niebuhr…

Niebuhr: Belief and the Incomplete

We talked recently about H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, a 1951 book exploring the relationship between Christ and culture. We focused on how it establishes two basic poles: ‘Christ against culture’, the idea that Christ exists in opposition to the dominant culture of the day (which you really find to some degree in any…

Niebuhr: On Christ and Culture

Long-time readers will know that I don’t often sit down and summarize the gist of the books I’m reading. The way I see it, there are probably plenty of other resources out there that are much better placed to do that work. If you want an introduction to the thought of Thomas Aquinas or a…

Ellul: Christianity and Anarchy

We discussed recently Jacques Ellul’s Anarchy and Christianity, a 1988 book where Ellul identifies a range of problems with our modern democracy – up to and including how it’s subverted or arguably completely undermined by the wealthy. The diagnosis seems sound, although his solutions maybe haven’t aged very well – he suggests that we should…

Ellul: Can Anarchism Work?

Jacques Ellul was a French theologian and Christian anarchist living in the 20th century. His life spreads fairly neatly across the century – he was born in 1912, and died 1994. He wrote a lot about the relationship between humans and technology, and I’ve been wanting to read his book Propaganda for a little while…

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