The Christian Humanist Podcast
So the podcast has finally gone live.? The Christian Humanist hopes to be a weekly podcast (tied, of course, to the academic calendar) hosted by Michial Farmer, David Grubbs, and myself, moderated on a weekly rotation by all three of us.? This is the first attempt for all three hosts, but on the whole, all three of us stand pleased with our efforts. ?You can view the show notes over at Michial Farmer’s blog, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed right now. ?Michial tells me that the podcast will also be available to an iTunes search soon.
At some point I’ll likely start transposing the show notes over here, but for right now, Michial’s version will do nicely. ?Listen if you like, and enjoy!
[edit 10/21/09: My apologies to those of you who tried to subscribe using FeedBurner. ?I'm working on some system for tracking download volume, but FeedBurner isn't cooperating. ?I've changed the links on this post back to the original feed, and I'll try to keep everyone updated on further developments.]
[edit 11/4/2009: More apologies for those of you who linked over from Homebrewed Christianity. ?The RSS feed is now correct. ?(I imagine most folks just subscribed through iTunes anyway, but if you didn't, please update your RSS aggregator with the updated and corrected feed.)]
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With the podcast, can you set it up so I can pause, then rejoin it at the point I paused? If I pause, when I rejoin it takes me to the beginning.
First of all, thank you for listening. It’s nice to know that folks are enjoying our project.
I’ll have to ask Michial if there’s something we can do on our end of things. Is ours the only file that does this on your mp3 player?
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Eric:
I don’t think that’s something we can control, although I’ll look into it. In the meantime, you can control that yourself through iTunes. Right click on the podcast, click “Get Info,” click on the Options tab, and check “Remember playback position.”
I have a Mac, and am not computer savvy (I am too old), don’t have a right click (or know what the Mac equivalent is). Played around and couldn’t find an Options tab.
Maybe ask Sam if there is a way to post the podcast so it can be stopped at any point and resumed at that point.
I am now listening to the 11/17 podcast. I am a calvinist, but not a Neo-Calvinist. Maybe it would be more accurate to say I am a Kuyperian. On the other end, Brad Cecil (an initiator of the emergent church movement) and I were roommates our first year of college. We have not had a lot of contact over the past 33 years, but have had some contact over the past year or two (maybe because I live in the Twin Cities where Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones are (and where lead Neo-Calvinist John Piper is situated)).
On Neo-Calvinism, I remember seeing a Christianity Today article three or four years ago on them. The photos were of a new Calvinist conference. What almost scared me was that the audience was almost entirely 19-26 year old males, no females in the audience (as I recall). That alone would be enough to frighten me away from that new Calvinism.
On Donald Miller, I find his works (and I have read most of them) not quite emergent. He seems to me a biblical fundamentalist, almost like a 16th century anabaptist. I wonder if David James Duncan is more honestly religious (almost Christian) than Miller.
Eric
I don’t know about Donald Miller…but in the Fall of 1998, I made dinner for David James Duncan — Home made pizza and Henry Whinehart’s cream soda. He seemed like a pretty nice guy.
Sorry…I meant the Fall of 1997. I was a student at the Oregon Extension and he came up to visit us for a few days.
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Eric–on a Mac, the equivalent of a right click is control + left click. This is one of the annoying features of macs. But if you are using a laptop, a quick and dirty way of pause and resume is to just shut it. Of course, this doesn’t work if you are trying to use it for other things.
Gilmour’s blog is now responding to its own comments. HOW POSTMODERN.
Podcastites
I have listened and enjoyed the podcasts a great deal. great work. I want to comment on the emergent – calvin issues. I work with recovering addicts and I believe that this is a movement that has significantly more staying power than the emergent movement. There is a vast underground of committed christians who espouse what I believe to be the best amalgamation of free will and sovreignty. Most of the believers that I know in this movement start by the total depravity point which is essentially step one of AA. The underpinning of being “powerless against the chemical which addicts me” is the concept of total depravity and the person who “gets it” will also say that “in myself there is nothing good”. At the same time the concept of free choice of the will to submit the will to the sovreignty of God is equally taught and understood. I have discussed this with the strict 5 pointers and they would say then that the addict is actually trying to do something to attain a relationship with God, but the addict more than anyone I know is aware that he or she is in fact powerless. I wonder if the 5 pointers would be willing to consider the possibility that all people are created with the possibility of not bending the will, but complete submission of the will as a universal God Given trait. The emergent church requires essentially a universal acceptance of all lifestyles and the calvinist requires adherance to the creed, but the recovering person has met the power of God through the submission of will and the grace that has then flowed into the ability to maintain sobriety. I have attempted to find other movements in history that have these 2 concepts of total depravity and free will as the 2 main cornerstones of faith, but have been unsuccessful. Please comment. thank you very much. By the way, my claim to fame is that my wonderful daughter married Sam Mulberry.
Dale,
Thank you for listening to the show. I think the tension you’ve mapped out between total depravity and free will is one of the perennial puzzles of Christian theology, and I think that to some extent, many Emergent-types and many Calvinist-types wrestle with that.
I like the way you formulate the relationship between how God creates humanity and how Sin warps humanity, and I think that a strong focus on the goodness of creation–and the logical priority of that goodness over the distortion of the goodness–is something that I often miss in the most dour of Calvinist treatments of things. In fact, that’s one of the most promising things about the Radical Orthodoxy movement, a postmodern theological movement that folks often overlook when describing the landscape of theological discourse in 2010.
If I could point to a couple of Christian writers who have done well in addressing that tension, I’d point to Augustine and Aquinas (as I tend to do for most important questions of theology, I’ll admit). Although Aquinas’s strong insistence upon the goodness inherent in Creation because of Creations’s analogical relationship to God strikes many Calvinists I know as too optimistic, I do think it’s a good antidote to the ways that some post-Reformation theologians elevate the Will to the foremost revealed datum about God (after the manner of William of Ockham, I think, but that’s for another discussion) above the goodness and love of God. And although Augustine’s focus changes over his career, I think his mature work in City of God articulates a wonderful (in the archaic and the pop-music senses) vision of the relationship between the goodness of human harmony (and the times when that harmony breaks into the sinful world) and the horror of the logically-posterior corruption that now grips that world.
I love that Sam’s family has joined our loyal listeners. My own mother and father are faithful listeners to CHP as well, and I’m glad that for the most part, we’re producing programs that make our folks proud.
That tension is also at the heart of my own existentialist Calvinism, of course. I seem to recall Karl Jasper’s “The Philosophy of Existence” dealing with this a bit–at least I made it deal with it when I talked it about it on Ladder on Wheels: http://ladderonwheels.blogspot.com/2009/04/deep-calls-to-deep-or-how-karl-jaspers.html.
Thanks for listening, Dale!