Category: Journal Issues

The essay reflects on periodic efforts to learn a little bit about those who neither share nor “validate” our views. As Donald Miller points out, Jesus was comfortable hanging out with people who did not validate his views. The essay explores attitudes that both hinder and help us in bridging the cultural divides that became entrenched after the Scopes Monkey Trial. “Building the bridge back,” as Miller puts it, is a kind of action Evangelicals are attempting, but are not yet fully comfortable doing.

This essay explores how the kind of emptiness or openness that lies at the heart of liberal capitalism has an unfortunate tendency to lend itself to the kind of constant expansion characteristic of empire. This emptiness and openness furthermore has a way of creating new forms of idolatry. The essay draws on the work of Andrew Bacevich to give an historical analysis of how the strategy of openness has lent itself to American imperial ambitions since the late 19th century. There follows a theological critique of empire based on a reading of Exodus 19-20. The essay concludes with some suggestions for how Christians should think about their primary political allegiance.

Click HERE to view the full article, response and rejoinder.

This article is a response to “The Empire of the Empty Shrine: American Imperialism and the Church” by William T. Cavanaugh. Webb argues that theologians need to be careful about intervening in economic analysis without a sufficient understanding of how capitalism creates wealth. Moreover, he argues that globalization, understood as a process of opening markets and expanding opportunities for freedom, can be interpreted providentially as a means for Christian evangelization. One can believe that the United States is playing a significant role in that plan today without believing that the United States is “the bringer of salvation to the world.” Finally, the essay seeks to illuminate the understanding that the church should, unlike Cavanaugh writes, pressure the political to conform to basic Christian truths, if and when that is possible. The church should use the political to advance Christian virtues, if the process of doing so does not damage those virtues.

Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni uses ravishing musical effects to make its listeners take delight in dreadful events. The moral ambiguity of this move has divided critics from Beethoven to Kierkegaard. This essay employs the theology of Karl Barth to achieve a fuller understanding of the opera, especially drawing on Barth’s essay on the absolutist humanism of the eighteenth century in his book Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century. The role which Mozart’s music plays in the opera is analogous to the patience with which God permits his rebellious human creation to have its day, a patience which itself can appear weak and indulgent even though it is the form of God’s almighty providence.