Theology Today

The late Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz was a voice of transcendent beauty amid the wasteland of modern and postmodern verse. His bold choice of themes, clear voice, compelling images, and searching faith are an encouragement to Christian poets and readers of poetry, showing us that, when it comes to spiritual matters, the contemporary world is open for discussion.

Preaching—defined as sermon writing, exegesis, or discursive skill—appears to be teachable. On the other hand, is preaching, defined as announcing the gospel, hence the mysteries of God and God's redemptive work, teachable? Preaching the gospel embodies and, at the same time, transforms the three primary features of aesthetic art: creativity, emotional world-engagement, and imagination. If these artistic features are gifts prior to any teaching, then we may doubt that pedagogy can facilitate preaching the gospel. At the same time, however, teachers of preaching can identify students' artistic powers, stir them up, and expose alien paradigms and rhetorics that divert preaching from the gospel, redirecting them toward those that embody the gospel's true aims. In this sense, preaching can be taught.

Intangible qualities can be expressed or communicated only indirectly, in and through tangible qualities. I have found it helpful to speak of this indirection as the process of “mediation.” This essay explores the notion of mediation in relation to aesthetic creation and appreciation, on the one hand, and a Christian understanding of incarnation, on the other. While the experience of mediation is, in fact, quite common in a wide variety of human activities, the actual pattern or dynamic of this phenomenon generally goes unnoticed and unappreciated.

Reflecting on the author's experience of parenting a son with disabilities and bringing this experience into conversation with authors such as Jean Vanier, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Levinas, this article suggests that “letting go” and becoming open to another in love is an experience of redemption that marks a conversion of self, one that transgresses boundaries and empowers the deepest kind of mutual belonging imaginable. Moreover, this conversion to another ultimately transforms us in the direction of a conversion to the divine itself, cultivating dispositions of gratitude and hope, for God is the relational power of the whole of reality, that which makes love imaginable, indeed possible.

Through an analysis of Gregory of Nyssa's treatise On the Soul and the Resurrection, this article argues for the compatibility of the doctrines of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body. Nyssa's view is explicitly contrasted to contemporary tendencies to set up a false dichotomy between the two doctrines. After answering the common objection that immortality is an intruder to Christian theology, a typology of four views on the relation between immortality and resurrection is set out. The article concludes with reflections on the theological and practical significance of Gregory's view.