1 Peter and "selective accomodation"

"First Peter had to help its readers justify their existence as Christians living as a 'holy community' within society. It was a single strategy with two interlocking components: creating an identity that separated them from Roman culture, and yet showing how they, as a 'community of the elect,' upheld the best of Greek and Roman values by 'living honorably among Gentiles.' First Peter does not urge its readers to reject the larger society wholesale. Instead, it urges a policy of selective accommodation. Those values that contribute to moral ruin it rejects wholeheartedly; those that foster political stability and social order it upholds steadfastly and encourages vigorously."

Carl Holladay, A Critical Introduction to the New Testament, p. 705.

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Now in (e-)print

My review of Experientia, Volume 2 has been posted at the Review of Biblical Literature website. A brief excerpt: "This volume offers an array of voices to think with, conversation partners to engage for those interested in examining ancient religious experience and the texts that reflected and elicited them. What it lacks in coherence it makes up for in verve. Experimentation may not provide the solid results we might desire, but it might just show us which paths are worth taking and which should remain untrod." If you're interested, read the review . If you're still interested after that, buy the book here or at Amazon .

Don't vote for Kant!!!

Cultural pessimism and our gravest error

Cultural pessimism is always fashionable, and, since we are human, there are always grounds for it. It has the negative consequence of depressing the level of aspiration, the sense of the possible. And from time to time it has the extremely negative consequence of encouraging a kind of somber panic, a collective dream-state in which recourse to terrible remedies is inspired by delusions of mortal threat. If there is anything in the life of any culture or period that gives good grounds for alarm, it is the rise of cultural pessimism, whose major passion is bitter hostility toward many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing. When panic on one side is creating alarm on the other, it is easy to forget that there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism--exactly the same grounds, in fact--that i, because we are human. We still have every potential for good we have ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respe...

Andrew Guffey

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