Paul F. Knitter on his experience of John Hick.

Basically, the Church was developing within a strongly partiarchal and heirarchical society…. Despite the freshness and hopefulness we see in Jesus and Paul, it is not surprising that male domination would soon assert itself and claim exclusive leadership privileges. Maybe women could lead among women, of course… no real complication or threat there.

John Hick, an influential theologian and philosopher who died earlier this year, was drawn to issues that transcend any particular tradition—the question of evil, the meaning of suffering, life after death, and religious diversity.

Students of the history and legacy of the West’s Protestant Reformation over its past millennium or thousand-year period can in contrast observe that “RiP” can have another connotation, which implies and express a less peaceful changing of attitudes and chain of events. What emerges is not a single “Reformation” but at least five “Re-formations” or modifications and amendments of attitudes, belief-systems and doctrinal confessions.

A View from the Underside: The Legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a one-person play adapted and performed by Al Staggs that brings the life of one of the great heroes of the twentieth century to the stage.

I believe it’s in the Bible that we find people and a God willing to wrestle with one another. The spirituality of the Bible is more mudwrestling than hang-gliding, from the depiction of a God who wrestles mud into human shapes in Jewish scriptures to the depiction of creation itself groaning in childbirth in Christian scriptures.

Henri once wrote that the “J. M.” in the middle of his name could stand for “Just Me.” He believed that the minister (again, every Christian) was called to live a life offered to others. The autobiography or memoir is said to have first appeared in The Confessions of Saint Augustine, and spiritual autobiography has long had a place as a means of doing theology. I lead workshops and retreats on spiritual autobiographical writing, encouraging participants to tell their stories.

I still remember the existential gut wrenching I felt when I first read John Dominic Crossan’s assertion that underneath the resurrection story that cracks like holy thunder on Easter morning was the more likely scenario that the crucified body of Jesus was probably consumed by wild dogs.

Brenda Peterson is a nature writer, born into a family that believed that we are living in the end times. We talk to her about her Southern Baptist background, what fundamentalists and environmentalists have in common, and about her new memoir, I Want to Be Left Behind.

In Odyssey on the Sea of Faith, Nigel Leaves maps the ways in which the ideas of Don Cupitt have developed, evolved, and changed — from mildly evangelical, to liberal, to leading exponent of the view that there is no God out there and that we must create new religious ways of be-ing. This book makes sense of Cupitt. For those interested in the ideas of Don Cupitt, it will be the authoritative resource for many years to come.