Anna Erickson > Recent Status Updates

"In the end she accepts the necessity for diagnosis and medication. However, that acceptance is as such theological as it is medical...Her thick story helps us to see that depression, like all human experience, is multifaceted and multistoried. Depression, like all diagnoses, needs to be narrated in its fullness if it is to be understood and responded to with compassionate faithfulness." (p. 68)

“There is clearly a need for richer and the icier conversation around spirituality and mental healthy than is provided by current culturally bound models and approaches. The question is... What might that look like? And how might we go about achieving such a goal?”

"The human world is torn straight through, and we can do nothing but live within its civil war...Jesus Christ is the One who fights for us. The church just is the gathered assembly of the war-torn, at rest under the banner of Peace.

The experience of partial victory, of a ceasefire that holds, a bit more firmly each day, just is the life of faith; it is what the Christian receives and cannot achieve."

Who is this Schmemann and WHERE has he been all my life? Truly shocked I haven’t read this yet in any classes.

Beautiful. Stunning. Lovely.

Quick, someone hold me back from becoming E. Orthodox. Just kidding, but WOW

Only reading this for research on discipleship-- would NOT recommend!

(I get that it has a place within the history of evangelical practical theology in helping us think about the reality of spiritual formation versus a solely multiplication method of discipleship, but it's theologically troubling in many spots.)

Fun alternative to Thomas as a way to dive into medieval theology. Learning a ton— a Christmas break exploration.

True and important work.

“The new being of believers in the Spirit, then, is established long before their temporal choice to become Christians; instead it is a ‘choice which has already been made, a decision which has been resolved and executed concerning them.’”

actuality precedes possibility

"Only theology enables safe passage, for by converting law into theology, specific practice into general belief, Bright can grant Paul his doctrine of exemption from Torah without granting Marcion his idea that the Jewish God and the Christ are antithetical. The specifics fade, the laws wither, but Old Testament theology endures forever."

Levenson is brilliant. And hilarious-- so tongue-in-cheek. Wow wow wow.

“The suppressed or forgotten past provides precedents helpful in dissolving the current consensus: historical criticism is invaluable to the venerable liberal (and, in my view, illogical) argument that the inevitability of unwilled change legitimates willed change, that the historical reality that the tradition was, de facto, always changing validates, de jure, contemporary efforts to alter it....