Forging Ploughshares

Brad and Paul reflect on the course recently completed with Anthony Bartlett, and discuss how this picture of a semiotic shift surrounding Christ serves as an alternative reading of the Bible and reality.  If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Paul Axton preaches: This sermon compares two understandings of Israel and God as presented in Nehemiah, Ezra, and Ruth, with Ruth the Moabite foreigner serving in the messianic line and as a kinsman redeemer through her faithful loving kindness, over and against the retributive picture of God and exclusive picture of Jews in Ezra and Nehemiah.   If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Notre Dame Professor Emmanuel Katongole, founder of Bethany Land Institute in Uganda, describes the theology and work of nonviolence in a world divided by violence and hatred.  If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Paul Axton preaches: There are competing images of God in the Bible between a God of law and vengeance and the God of mercy and love. This contention is resolved in Christ in which true deity is found in the face of the forgiving human victim, and this highlights a theme traceable throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Frederick Bauerschmidt describes the practical work of teaching about the peace of Christ in the Catholic Church when violent Christian nationalism is the norm.  If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Paul Axton preaches: History is of eternal significance in that it pertains to God's identity, and the impact of this significance is in its liberation from an enslaving finite understanding into the liberating eternal reality of God found in Christ. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Jordan Daniel Wood continues the conversation with Matt and Paul and in part 2 describes Hegel's picture of an inadequate notion of the infinite, and he pictures Hart as falling into this failed understanding, which explains Hart's rejection of Jordan's Maximian-Hegelian understanding.  If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Paul Axton preaches: appealing to the work of Sergius Bulgakov, Axton develops the significance of God's presence in the name given to Moses, and then Christ's assumption of this name and the opening to all the possibility of dwelling in the name, which describes the possibility of God pouring himself out in and through human language.  If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Jordan Daniel Wood, in conversation with Matt and Paul, explains the logic of Hegel as a natural development of Maximus' understanding of personhood, which also serves to address the failure of David Bentley Hart to grasp the paradigm shift Jordan is picturing in light of Hegel.  If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

In this talk at a gathering at a local restaurant (thus the country music in the background) Paul Axton presents the manner in which Christ defeats cosmic and personal trauma through the work of predestination. The Erasure of Cosmic and Personal Trauma in the Lamb Crucified from the Foundation of the World