This book is a resolute call for the recovery of the doctrine of original sin. As such, it stands more or less in a line with Karl Menninger’s Whatever Became of Sin? (1973) and Neal Plantinga’s Not the Way It’s Supposed To Be: A Breviary of Sin (1995), though curiously neither of these seminal titles is cited in this 2003 publication. And of course, his emphasis on original sin puts him theologically in the good company of Luther, Calvin, Barth,…
In one dream, I find the room and arrive on time, but the seats remain empty. In another I search pantingly for the room as the clock ticks relentlessly past the starting time. Still another has me arriving on time with the students all in place, but I have forgotten some important item of clothing. Sometimes the students hiss and jeer and fail to laugh at my jokes. I wake up early. The semester approaches. These are teacher dreams, familiar…
An anxious mind is paralyzed by choice. The angel doesn’t offer choice but birth …
One Israelite tradition, the dominant one, held that wisdom came with the experience of years and that the elders bore the responsibility of codifying and passing it on to children. … The other tradition held that wisdom resided in children who saw the world afresh and often had a keener sense of God’s presence and purposes than their elders.
Sun House reads like Duncan’s other novels: sprawling, ambitious, imperfect, bursting with humor and sex and spiritual longing, drawing on ancient wisdom traditions of every kind and synthesizing them into nothing less audacious than a new nonreligion, which he calls Dumpster Catholicism.
