Every Empire Thought It Was the Exception: Barry Harvey on the American Shelf Life and What the Church Does Now

Barry Harvey is back with a book that puts madness, theocracy, and anarchism in the title. It's a collection of essays developed over his career, and beneath them all sits one assertion: the church is not a subsystem of civil society. It has its own integrity, its own allegiance, and its own context for rethinking how it relates to everything else. The preface opens with Justin Martyr noting that second-century Christians were charged with madness for putting a crucified man right next to God. Barry's point: if the church has a healthy understanding of itself, it already is a resistance movement — rooted in scripture, liturgy, and tradition, and located, as Bonhoeffer put it, in the middle of the human village. We got into ecclesial solidarity and the ordo amoris (and the administration official who thinks he can do Catholic theology), the American form of cheap grace, the neoliberal collapse of state and market into one thing, and then — because Barry has multiple music degrees and I have no self-control — Bonhoeffer's polyphony, Tolkien's Silmarillion, the long defeat, eucatastrophe, and Gandalf's ecclesiology. I skipped every one of my Richard Rorty questions the moment Tolkien came up. I regret nothing.

You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube

Dr. Barry Harvey is Professor of Theology in the Honors College and the Department of Religion at Baylor University, where he has taught since 1988. He holds an MDiv from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a PhD from Duke University. His new book is Madness, Theocracy, and Anarchism: Political and Cultural Reflections on the Church.

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