@alexdemarco
academic book editor • occasional author • appreciator of scholarship & elegant writing • interested in religion, esp. (post)modernist versions of Christianity & Buddhism • also a fan of trees, cats, and movies • all views strictly my own • he/him/his 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🌿
I'm curious: How would you understand the "for us"?
I ask because I sometimes struggle to feel the awe. Maybe a particular atonement theory (I'm pretty familiar with the traditional slate) hasn't quite clicked for me, or hasn't been demythologized such that it can really speak and inspire awe.
What if we stopped thinking of revelation as the conveyance of divine authority in one place, or a limited number of places, and thought of it instead as the promise of divine presence in every place?
"Christian exceptionalism relies on conjuring a history that did not exist."
religiondispatches.org/2026/02/23/d...
My article, "How I Became Religiously Multiple," made Christian Century's "Top 25 of 2025"! 😊
See the link for it, and the other top articles, here:
www.christiancentury.org/editor-s-pos...
"But the universe would not turn backward. It was a great engine . . . inviting humankind to attempt other forms of order and disorder."
—Frank Herbert, Children of Dune (1976)
“To have serpentlike qualities devoid of dovelike qualities is to be passionless, mean, and selfish. To have dovelike qualities without serpentlike qualities is to be sentimental, anemic, and aimless. We must combine strongly marked antitheses. . . .”
—from Strength to Love (Fortress, 2010).
“Jesus reminds us that the good life combines the toughness of the serpent and the tenderness of the dove. . . .
“He never experiences the beauty of friendship, because he is too cold to feel affection for another and is too self-centered to share another’s joy and sorrow. He is an isolated island. No outpouring of love links him with the mainland of humanity. . . .
“The hardhearted person never truly loves. He engages in a crass utilitarianism that values other people mainly according to their usefulness to him. . . . In the vast wheels of industry, he sees men as hands. . . .
“But we must not stop with the cultivation of a tough mind. The gospel also demands a tender heart. . . .
“Soft mindedness is one of the basic causes of . . . prejudice. The tough-minded person always examines the facts before he reaches a conclusion; in short, he postjudges. . . .
“The tough-minded individual is astute and discerning. He has a strong, austere quality that makes for firmness of purpose and solidness of commitment. . . .
“[Today there is a need for] a tough mind, characterized by incisive thinking, realistic appraisal, and decisive judgment. The tough mind is sharp and penetrating, breaking through the crust of legends and myths and sifting the true from the false. . . .
“The shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of soft-mindedness. . . .
“The soft-minded man . . . fears change, . . . feels security in the status quo, . . . has an almost morbid fear of the new. . . . The soft-minded person always wants to freeze the moment and hold life in the gripping yoke of sameness. . . .
“There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think. . . .
“Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” (Matthew 10:16) . . .
“Life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony. . . . We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart. . . .
For this #MLKday, some timely selections from Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermon "A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart": . . .
"What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?"
—Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah (1969)
"There wasn’t even clear evidence that those drug traffickers were from Venezuela, let alone that they were governed by Maduro in any sense."
—Susan Breau, prof. of international law and senior associate research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...
My old college classmate Brett McCracken has frustrated me many times in the past with his Gospel Coalition conservatism, but this review of Wake Up Dead Man seems targeted to upset me. He twice uses the term “true Christianity.” The headline itself is outrageous bothsidesism.
🙏
I'm tempted to say that I like Everybody Scream even more than I like Dance Fever.
Maybe that's just the charm of the new. But maybe not?
Literal eschatology—the expectation that an outside power will one day swoop in and "set everything right"—is a recipe for tragically unconstructive discontentment. It discourages both working to change present circumstances and looking for happiness in the present.
"Thanks to emptiness, everything is possible; without emptiness, nothing is possible."
—Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24.14
"Many . . . are drawn into thinking that emptiness is the ground of being, the ontological ground of everything. But emptiness, when understood rightly, is the absence of *any* ontological ground. . . . It is not any kind of absolute or ultimate reality."
—Thich Nhat Hanh, The Other Shore, chap. 4
"The results show that urgent action is needed to stop forest loss or the world risks losing one of its most important natural carbon buffers. . . ."
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Check out my article from the August 2025 issue of the Christian Century. 😊🙏
"The name (of) 'God' is not the name of an assured presence but of a tremulous coming-to-presence, of a soft voice that disturbs the peace of the present and pries it open to the prospect of what is coming."
—John D. Caputo, What to Believe?, 175