An Absolution Revolution blog

Classic texts found communities, are sustained by them, and in turn sustain them, and interpretation is like a communal dialogue (or better, multilogue) which takes place between individuals within a community and among community.[1] The Bible specifically is the “classic text” of the church, and the church in turn is the community of its interpretation. [...]

“Interpretive community” is a key concept in Stanley Fish’s writings on interpretation and criticism of texts. The concept of interpretive community is a strategy to engage the dilemma of interpretation in which the roles of “text” and “reader” struggle for the power to determine meaning. Faced with the reality that there are often as many [...]

Thanks so much to all of you who have responded to our needs after the fire, either in comments, emails, or other ways. As part of beginning to get back into the swing of some kind of normal life, I am now going to begin writing articles for the blog as I had been before. [...]

This is the third part of my paper. In this section I briefly explore the religious aspect of the state, as well as its “liturgies,” or the collective acts by which we are incorporated into the state’s imagination.

The liturgies of the state are practices by which its imagination is generated and reproduced. This imagination as [...]

This is the second part of my paper, “Interpretation and the Prophetic Imagination: The Church as Hermeneutic Community.” In this section I explore the concept of imagined community in relation to the modern nation-state, drawing on the work of Benedict Anderson and William Cavanaugh.

To illumine the concept of the imagined community, it is helpful to [...]

The following is from my paper for my Theology of the Church course. This is the pre-edit draft, so go easy on any silly writing errors! I will probably post the whole thing in installments.

If the business of the church is to celebrate and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus, whose first preached [...]