What does it mean to be human?

For most of us, subjectively, the everyday experience of being human probably hasn’t changed very much, but we may be aware of a storm of questions blowing furiously outside the house, rattling the windows and loosening tiles. What does it mean to be male and female? What is a “normal” state of mental health? Are ethnicity and nationality essential to our humanity? Are we anything more than compliant consumers of goods and services? Is AI making the human mind redundant? And as we enter the Anthropocene, are we—paradoxically—losing control of our destiny?

To be human is not just to be one thing. It is to be part of a story with a past, a present, and an imagined future.

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On Transmillennialism and Kevin Beck's This Book Will Change Your World
I read Kevin Beck’s This Book Will Change Your World in response to some gentle and persistent prompting from Mike Morrell. As Mike observes, there are some interesting similarities and some distinct differences between Kevin’s exposition of Transmillenialism and the thesis of… ()
Katongole: Communities of memory
In the first essay, ‘Remembering Idi Amin’, Katongole explores his own childhood memories of Idi Amin in an attempt to understand how the present condition of Africa has been shaped by memories of colonial and post-colonial brutality. He notices that his ‘happy’ memories of the early period of Amin… ()
Emmanuel Katongole and A Future for Africa
I have started reading Emmanuel Katongole’s A Future for Africa: Critical Essays in Christian Social Imagination as preparation for the Amahoro conference in Johannesburg in a couple of weeks. Katongole is a Catholic priest from Uganda who is now associate professor of theology at Duke… ()
Is that third horizon just a mirage?
Mike Morrell has articulated a good question about the thesis of The Coming of the Son of Man and Re: Mission. It comes down to this: Given the metaphorical potential of biblical language, what keeps us from deflating all apparently final language to historical… ( | 3 comments)
Should we still be making disciples?
I have argued a couple of times recently that Jesus’ post-resurrection instruction to his followers to make disciples of all nations, which we call the Great Commission, is actually more restricted in its scope than we have traditionally understood it to be. There was some discussion of this point… ( | 2 comments)
Does the future lie with the global church or with the emerging church?
There was an interesting article in the UK Times yesterday about the global success of ‘US-style muscular Christianity’ - that is, evangelicalism. The article is by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge and is based on their book God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the… ()
What is a missional church? And why I think Mark Driscoll is wrong
I forget quite how I got there - by what tortuous cyber-trail - but I came across a post on Mark Driscoll’s Resurgence blog promoting his new book Vintage Church, in which he touches on the question of what ‘missional church’ is. Driscoll is not naïve. Even from this brief statement… ( | 1 comment)