Phd in New Testament and Early Christianity from Durham University, England. I have a love for all things alt-rock, Pixar, football (American style), hockey (on ice), poetry, and good, short literature. On Twitter @toddbrewer_
About Todd Brewer
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The Elusive Strangeness of Jesus
People don’t say it often enough: Jesus was pretty weird. He cleared out the Temple with a butter knife (so to speak), he laughed off death threats from Herod, and he regularly insulted his dinner hosts. Jesus held a patent disregard for social graces and conventions. When given the chance, he did or said the […]
Boys Will Be Boys (and Other Dodgy Excuses)
I stood a few steps away from my young daughter at a playground, watching her wait patiently as all the boys dashed in front of her and repeatedly took her toys away. Sometimes they would ask, but usually not. I stood there feeling a little helpless, not sure if I should intervene, wondering whether any […]
Another Week Ends: Religious Decline, Peloton, Halloween Righteousness, Reformation Day, and Kanye
1a. This week featured a point-counter-point on the religious decline in America. Fewer people are going to church, particularly millennials. Accordingly, Christine Emba sees genuine cause for alarm. Millennials prefer low-cost, substitute religions (read: seculosities!), and the church may not be there as a fallback option in the future: Faith and practice can’t persevere through […]
There Is a Shrink in Gilead: The Church and Mental Health
When it comes to the treatment of mental health, many of the therapeutic approaches taken today tend to be highly individualized. The afflicted person goes (alone) to see a therapist, who provides a resources or insight to aid the patient. The broad successes of this approach speaks for itself. Mental health professionals so often see […]
Paul and the Person: An Interview with Susan Grove Eastman
Recently I had the privilege of sitting down to interview Susan Grove Eastman to talk about her recently published book, Paul and the Person. Dr. Eastman is the Associate Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, and her book is a fascinating read. Paul and the Person breaks new ground on the complex issue […]
Mining Netflix: “Father Brown”
What do you get when you cross Sherlock Holmes with Pope Francis and Arthur Weasley? You get a slightly bumpling but brilliant Catholic priest who moonlights as a murder detective. “Father Brown” is the literary creation of G.K. Chesterton, and the BBC show based on him is now airing on Netflix in its entirety. I […]
Stormzy Takes Glastonbury to Church
Stormzy is a star in the UK and has the following to prove it. He’s the first black solo artist headlining at Glastonbury, but who’d have thought that a pop concert with tens of thousands of people–and no Kanye–would become a worship service? The lyrics are spectacular and the whole scene is profoundly moving.
ht JMGB
Preaching Politically in Turbulent Times
Was Rudolf Bultmann a Nazi sympathizer? Short answer—no. And yet…the accusation is commonplace within some sectors of scholarship. In his recent Gifford lectures, the New Testament scholar N.T. Wright said as much, accusing Bultmann of Lutheran “quietism” in the face of the Third Reich because he was a “friend and philosophical disciple” of the infamous Nazi, […]
Enchanting a Disenchanted World
In his book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor narrated the long process of disenchantment in the Western world, where the rationality of the scientific worldview comes to dominate how people live from day to day. In the absence of official religion, Taylor contends that people have made themselves and their authenticity the new means of […]
Hopelessly Devoted: Mark Chapter Twelve Verses One Through Twelve (The Parable of the Wicked Tenants)
Then he began to speak to them in parables. “A man planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a pit for the wine press, and built a watchtower; then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the season came, he sent a slave to the tenants to collect from […]
Get Out While You Can: A Defense of Escapism
Escapism has a bad name nowadays. It’s usually equated with those who play video games for far too long, get lost in fiction books, or never come back from their Hawaii vacation. Escapists are the ignorant who bury their head in the sand in the hopes that they won’t be devoured. In Christian circles, they are the hermetic […]
Seculosity and St. Paul
David Zahl didn’t put me up to this, I swear. But if the Apostle Paul were alive today, I dare say he would have written Seculosity. Let me explain. The secular world in which we live now wouldn’t have been imaginable to the Apostle Paul. In the first century, everything one did was connected to […]
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