njnapier

Thinking Tombstones & the Grave

Graveyards, Tombstones…the speck of infinity wherein time has stopped. Here one is able to notice an era of foregone lives and remembrance that is now only marked by stones that are too large to move and to irrelevant to demand attention. Some stones have been pushed over, some broken in half; others have crumbled fromContinue reading “Thinking Tombstones & the Grave”

A Poetic Essay: Writing Love & Poetry with Cixous

Helene Cixous, the philosopher, writer, thinker, novelist, poet…one with the uncanny ability to grasp the impossible and poetically narrate newer possibilities. As Derrida describes of her, “A poet-thinker, very much a poet and very much a thinker.” She writes the kind of poetry that describes the conversant and then leaves one asking, “what just happened?”Continue reading “A Poetic Essay: Writing Love & Poetry with Cixous”

Too Scared to Love: an Essay on Fear, Love & the Gaze

FEAR & GOSPEL “Perfect Love Casts out all Fear,” so the writer of the Epistle of 1 John tells us. In a world of so much fear, and so little love, one is left to wonder if there is indeed a perfect love that can handle the level of fear that seems to be inundatingContinue reading “Too Scared to Love: an Essay on Fear, Love & the Gaze”

Jesus and Islam: The Perfect Scapegoats

“Christ is not divinized as a scapegoat. Those who take him to be God – Christians – are the ones who do not make him their scapegoat,” writes Renee Girard in his text Quand Ces Choses Commenceront. Girard’s work attempts to reveal the role that violence and victimization play in the organization of human societyContinue reading “Jesus and Islam: The Perfect Scapegoats”

Christ of Chaos- a sermon in Luke

*A sermon on Jesus, judgment and some difficult words of The Christ in the recent Lectionary reading of Luke 12.49-53* “When life has become old and the spirit faint, it is in the beginnings that we again find the living springs from which the vital energies flow” Jurgen Moltmann, “Hope and Reality: Contradiction and Correspondence,”Continue reading “Christ of Chaos- a sermon in Luke”

Exchanging the Resurrection for the Soul

“I am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought that His second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all theContinue reading “Exchanging the Resurrection for the Soul”

Christ Goes to the Movies: The Conjuring and Resurrection

Our culture is a walking contradiction. Drives me crazy. We are on board with Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, or any “professional” atheist writing today…then these same people buying the books of these methodologically inept charlatans of logic, flock to theaters to see a movie about nothing more, or less, than our fascination with the paranormalContinue reading “Christ Goes to the Movies: The Conjuring and Resurrection”

Idol/Idle Chatter: Thinking God without Being

“The idol determines the ‘god’ on the basis of the aim, hence of an anterior gaze…The idol is constituted by the thrust of an aim anterior to any possible spectacle, but also by a first visible, where, settling, it attains, without seeing, its invisible mirror, low-water mark of its rise…In other words, the proposition “GodContinue reading “Idol/Idle Chatter: Thinking God without Being”

It’s called The Book of Revelation, not “Revelations”

The most popular and feared book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation, suffers a thousand deaths every time someone gets this wrong. You can hear it at any coffee shop (at least in my town), church parking lot, or casual argument at work when a co-worker is trying to convince you of all theContinue reading “It’s called The Book of Revelation, not “Revelations””

God is Nothing: Lacan Wrestles with Thing 1 & Thing 2

“In the symbolic order, the empty spaces are as signifying as the full ones; in reading Freud today, it certainly seems that the first step of the whole of his dialectical movement is constituted by the gap of an emptiness” -Jacques Lacan in his “Response to Jean Hyppolite’s Commentary on Freud’s ‘Verneinung.’” Everyone wants something. Continue reading “God is Nothing: Lacan Wrestles with Thing 1 & Thing 2”