Stephen Blackwood
Appearances
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
I'm Stephen Blackwood. I'm the founding president of Ralston College, a new university in Savannah, Georgia. I grew up in a Christian home reading the Bible, really in a daily basis. And so, these stories, you might say, were
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
maybe the most important frame through which I understood or came to understand, so far as I came to understand it, the world, especially my relations with my family, my younger siblings, nature, the community at large, beauty.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
It was only later when I went to university that I learned that these stories and the stories of Judeo-Christian traditions both in their synthesis with the Greek intellectual tradition really produced Western civilization. That is fundamentally the synthesis that drives the whole unfolding of the West.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
My deepest conviction is that human beings matter, that they are made in the image of what is most real and fundamental. And yet I think it's plainly the case that the dominant
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
ideological positions in our own time are woefully, painfully, desperately inadequate, whether that's reductivist materialism or certain kinds of existential immediacy or the hyper-politicization and activism of everything all the time, you know, the nihilism that there is nothing but power. These are psychologically, morally, theologically destructive in every sense.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
And so it seems to me there's nothing more important than our rediscovering modes of understanding what the human being is, what we are, and how we can recover our relation to what is most fundamental and real, which we could call, let's say, God. So I'm hoping that this text in all of its power will come alive for us and we'll make some headway in that.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
Whether the challenge in a way is pretty simple to state easily, it's that we're trying to cover all four Gospels in really just a few hours. We're talking about perhaps the most influential, the most powerful, the most difficult, the most radically unexpected words and stories of all time. You know, we're trying to cover it quickly.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
And the temptation, if I can put it that way, will be to schematize so we can kind of make sense of it. And I think the challenge will be to sit with it in a way that what is most powerful and transformative in these unexpected words can speak to our own hearts and hopefully to the hearts of those who are listening.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
If I could just pick up for a second on something, Dr. Peterson, you were saying about motherhood. It's very interesting to hear the pattern that is emerging. An angel comes in both situations to prophesy the birth. And in one sense, pregnancy is... one of the great examples of fulfillment of nature, right? It's the actualization of the potentiality for motherhood.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
And yet that fulfillment in both cases is a radical self-othering. Both of these sons will die brutal deaths. And so I think what's being indicated here already in a very fundamental sense is the inherently non-instrumental of love itself. And so that you are fulfilled precisely in the transcending of your own fulfillment.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
And when Jesus says that my kingdom is not of this world, I mean, it seems to me what the scriptures are speaking to us of already here in the announcement of the angels about the pregnancy and birth of the children who will die deaths that are not for themselves is the radically, is the radical self-othering
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
that is the nature of self, you might say the realization of the self in the deepest sense.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
And you see this in Christ at the very end, this is mirrored on the cross where he is going to say as his last act, as you might say, reconstituting that family between, in a sense, between Mary and John so that the ultimate act of self-othering is the principle that is able to bring together some harmony in us and in what is around us.