A discussion between me and Dad about Katie Langston's phenomenal memoir Sealed, tracing her life from Mormon upbringing to conversion to Christianity to discerning a call into ministry. A must-read for anyone interested in the Latter-day Saints as well as hope and healing for people scarred from high-demand religion. Be sure to get the new second edition, now in ebook and paperback!

Tradition is a buzzword in confessional polemics: Protestants (supposedly) say Scripture only, while Catholics and Orthodox (supposedly) say Scripture-and-Tradition without hierarchical triage between them. Of course, it has never been that simple! Luther and Melanchthon and the Formula of Concord all insist that they were in fact more faithful to the tradition of the church against Roman innovation. Roman Catholics rightly point out all that is not explicit in Scripture and yet adhered to faithfully by the church, including Protestants (e.g. the word “Trinity” or infant baptism). For that matter, Scripture itself is a form of Tradition and full of Tradition—as the opening words of I Corinthians 15 attest, and much biblical scholarship of the past two hundred years has excavated.

So what do we even mean by Tradition? How do we judge it or select from it—because everybody in fact does just that? How do we know what is a faithful development from the original apostolic gospel and what is a treacherous deviation? What “principle of critical judgment” or “clear method of discrimination”? David Bentley Hart and his book Tradition and Apocalypse to the rescue! ... maybe.

Related episodes: Theology & Experience 1, Theology & Experience 2, Islam, Bondage of the Will, St Paul among the Philosophers

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You foolish person! I Corinthians 15 isn't the place to come for an instruction manual, but for a redirection toward the one who was raised from the dead for the glory of God. In this episode Dad and I talk through what is—and isn't—the subject matter of the apostle's treatise on resurrection, where to be exuberant (i.e. doxology), where to be sober (i.e. the mechanics of the life to come), and why it makes all the difference to the living of this mortal life right now.

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Sarah discusses "The Water Bus," the last story to be covered from the collection Star Over Bethlehem by Agatha Christie Mallowan, with Kemper Donovan of the All About Agatha podcast!

Everything is authorized to me—but I will not let just anything have authority over me. And therein lies the path of discernment for a baptized Christian body in the world. Sex, marital and otherwise? Food, idolatrous or not? What has the promised resurrection to do with the mortal body in this life? In this episode Dad and I work our way through the 6th, 7th, and 8th chapters of I Corinthians to see both what the Apostle Paul concludes and how he gets there—and what that means for Christian bodies all these centuries later.

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Where is the debater of this age? All over the internet, apparently. The Apostle Paul would not be impressed, and neither should you. If the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God, how much more its folly!

In the meanwhile, however, there is the real and contentious question of what, exactly, makes for God's wisdom and God's strength. Hint: if the answer does not include the cross of Christ, it fails the test. In this episode, Dad and I talk our way carefully through I Corinthians 1, 2, and a bit of 3 to discover how the foolishness of God exceeds human wisdom.

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A quick introduction to a new ebook from Sarah: sermons on all four Passion accounts from all four Gospels. Download your free ebook of Lenten Postil on the Passion here.

Transfiguration Sunday is coming soon -- the 15th of February! Arm yourself against the inevitable rehashing of the same with this, the second of seven ways of looking at the Transfiguration. Or better yet, treat yourself to all Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration.

SO MANY PROBLEMS when you try to think about the resurrection of the dead... one of the reasons it is abandoned as much by naive faith and scientific sophistication. Should we take such a challenge lying down? No, we shall not! In this episode, Dad and I rise to the occasion (see what I did there?) to think through, with the guidance of the gospel, what it even means to say that Jesus rose from the dead or that we too shall rise, what it doesn't mean, and why it would even be good news.

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The Sermon on the Mount will make its once-every-three-years appearance in the lectionary starting in late January, so here is a re-release of Sarah's poetic paraphrase thereof. For downloads and print purchases of Sermon on the Mount: A Poetic Paraphrase visit Thornbush Press.

After a three-year interim, Dad and I finally return to Reinhold Niebuhr's magisterial work, The Nature and Destiny of Man, first delivered as the Gifford Lectures in 1939, then revised and published in 1943. In this episode on vol. 2, we discuss what Dad cribbed from Niebuhr upon his first reading this book 55 years ago (!), the question of metanarratives and what we can (and can't) know about history, why the atonement is necessary, and of course, Sarah's favorite topic, the Parousia of Christ. This year of podcasting ends not with a whimper, but a bang!

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Notes:

1. Related episodes: Niebuhr on the Nature of Man, Resurrection according to Macrina and Nyssa, Before Auschwitz, Doctrine to Bible (and Back Again), Cybertech and Personhood, Propaganda, The Image of God

2. Antti Raunio, "Martin Luther and Love"

3. Need more on communism? Try this very digestible approach in Sarah's memoir, I Am a Brave Bridge, about the Hinlicky family's year in Slovakia just after the fall of the iron curtain

4. Need more on the Parousia? Sarah's Forty Facets of the Ascension is now out on all platforms! And, guess what, lots on the Parousia in her Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration, too!