Sublime

Augustine is our contemporary. He has directly and indirectly shaped the way we understand our pursuits, the call to authenticity.

In liberating ourselves by locking out transcendence, the price we paid was sealing ourselves in a cell. We thought we were our own liberators; turns out we might be our own jailers.

JOERI SCHRIJVERS

And the third crisis, through which we’re living? That, Professor Rex argued, involves “. . . a question that would once have been expressed as ‘What is man?’ The fact that this wording is now itself seen as problematic is a symptom of the very condition it seeks to diagnose. What is it, in other words, to be human?” That, Rex rightly contends, is

the buffered self seems predisposed to lock divine action out of its inner world, radically reversing Augustine’s vision and making things very difficult for the pastor. If God is to enter this space that Augustine helped make, then God must be stripped of otherness and made into a therapeutic crutch that the brave can outgrow.

The cultural environment was perfect for this shift in pastoral identity; the spiritual markets were unregulated, the hegemony of established religion was done, mainline Protestant America was over, and yet the age of authenticity and its nova effect moved people to seek spirituality. The monopolies were broken up, and yet there was spiritual deman

Ecclesiology-so often scoffed at by those who see it as merely "horizontal" rather than the really important thing, the "vertical" dimension of soteriology-is non-negotiable. In Christ there is no vertical and horizontal. Paul was not a Platonist.

building was as secular and utilitarian as any office complex. Rather than an invitation to enter into a sacred reality, it presented a place to find the resources to personally flourish (including childcare assistance, counseling centers, support groups, exercise classes, and coffee shops).