Matthews House Project (Link here)

This is a website I visit pretty frequently. If you have read the Gazette you might recognize Zachry Kincaid's name. He is a friend of my fathers, and had some issues at OBU....(where my father works and Zach used to work) Whatever one believes about the issue, Zach produces a good journal, in my opinion. Below is an excerpt from a review on a book called Subversive Orthodoxy. The second paragraph has a little bit on the child...which i thought was interesting to add to our discussion of a couple of days ago. This book apparently looks at philosophers such as Locke, Descartes, Kant, writers like Jack Kerouac, and William Blake to discover the path and understanding we have taken of christianity in our modern age.

If you are interested in religious articles which look at ideas within the context of our culture, either to read, or perhaps submit your own material to, you should see this website.


A Review by Zachry O. Kincaid, director of The Matthew's House Project

Subversive. Outlaw. Revolutionary. 21st Century Christian Church? No. Not yet. This undetermined and hopeful “not yet” is the underlying tension of Robert Inchausti’s new book that weights these descriptives onto orthodoxy. He sees the deadening of God and the hyper-grip on reason as “withering on the lonely, dissipated vine of the disseminated postmodern ‘self’” (17).
. . .
From the novelist Inchausti moves to social activists. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, E.F. Schumacher, and Wendell Berry are each summarized. The plea of social action is to to “change the way you process experience.” But social action is not simply to “get” something, but to be as a child, “pure and full of trust.” The Christian, “must be as totally available to his world as the child is.” In other words, the Christian must act with a purity of intention, “serving something greater than history,” Inchausti says we can call it justice or the kingdom of heaven, but it is clear that it stands “over and above political expediency in its appeal to responsibilities that transcend our own immediate wants, needs, and commitments” (101). The Christian sets social action not in ideas but in the embodiment of a person, Jesus, and his sometimes nonsensical parables and actions that hint forward the kingdom of God.
. . .
“We are living in an age of momentary passions,” says Inchausti about , “impoverished collectives, spur-of-the-moment convictions contradicted by spur-of-the-moment retractions” (139). At the end, Inchausti’s text reaches the macrohistorical narrative where weaves and pulls bring together the stories of a people and the contemplative dare that we must more than entertain. Marshall McLuhan’s study of the simulated environment and multilayered culture, disjointed and ignorant one for the other is one example given. “When electricity allows for the simultaneity of all information for every human being,” writes McLuhan, “it is Lucifer’s moment… Technically speaking, the age in which we live is certainly favorable to an Antichrist. Just think: each person can instantly be tuned to a ‘new Christ’ and mistake him for the real Christ” (142). Ivan Illich is another macrohistorical figure. He believes that our words have become “manipulated,” and that life now stands in the drivel of “manufactured texts, contrived messages, blocks of discourse, unread downloads, and unreadable metadiscourses” (164).