Head full of sermons, mouth full of spiders.

In the words of The Onion's Jim Anchower: "Hola Amigos. I know it's been a while since I rapped at ya."

Looks like my exam period sabbatical was extended by a few weeks. Such is life. I haven't felt all that articulate lately, and the reason(s) why remains something of a mystery to me.

I've been doing this blogging thing for over a year now, and as I looked over the archives of this blog, I've noticed that there's been a bit of a decrease in the quality of writing here. Funny how that works - When I started this thing, I was working a shitty job, crammed under flourescent lights until 2 in the damn morning. My writing flourished. Now, it would seem that I have all the things important to being a good writer: stimulating academic environment, cushy bookstore job, plentiful coffee, new penchant for poetry and the warm glow of 60 watt bulbs. Yet most of what I've tried to write these past few weeks has been froth. Go figure.

My writing may be suffering, but my reading has taken off in its stead. Currently, I'm working my way through Jim Wallis' "God's Politics," which I'm finding is chock full of stuff that I already intuitively know. That's ok though, because it's always good to have someone else articulate what you're feeling.

In regards to books dealing with things I don't know a lot about, I'm strolling through James K.A. Smith's "Introducing Radical Orthodoxy." Smith is a professor at Calvin College, and this primer is significantly more readable than the rather turgid work of John Milbank, who along with Catherine Pickstock is the primary architect of Radical Orthodoxy.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the role of Christian thinkers in academia. It's been one of my frustrations to see that people operating with an explicitly religious epistemological foundation are often made the laughingstock of "progressive" academic departments across the land. I experienced this first-hand while I was a graduate student in Bowling Green, Ohio.

It's been my contention that Christians and other religious thinkers deserve a spot at the academic debate table as much as any other member of any other given discipline. The postmodern condition has made this all the more possible, in my estimation. It has exploded the prideful notions of secularity, empirical observation, the "disinterested observer," and other modernist hysterias. With these products of the Enlightenment left in shambles, it seems only reasonable to assume that the Enlightenment is no longer the only epistemological foundation on which we can or should rest. Thus, religious academics need a place at the table wherein they can express their unique viewpoints formulated through the epistemological foundation of their faiths.

This seems to be the starting point of the Radical Orthodoxy project.

In Bowling Green, the general tenor of academic life was hostile to religiously based opinions. Modernist presuppostions of pure reason and secular objectivity ran the show there, intellectually speaking. Yet most of the people professed to be good postmodernists, reveling in the indispensible Foucault and the probably-worthwhile-but-nearly-incomprehensible Derrida. The hypocrisy was astounding.

Maybe I shouldn't call it hypocrisy. Maybe those old modernist ghosts just die hard.

Anyways, the introduction of the book speaks of a "theological cartography," tracing the evolution of RO from Amsterdam to Cambridge to Princeton. This reminded me of the old intellectual cartography detailing the relationship between "Athens and Jerusalem," or in other words, the integration of faith and learning.

In my own personal cartographic scheme, the map is much smaller. I like to think of it as the relationship between Bowling Green and Grand Rapids. It's been a heap of fun putting John Calvin in dialogue with Michel Foucault.