I have been blogging now for about ten months (my previous blog, which died an ignominious death, is best forgotten; I think I am even going to remove it from my blogroll, as much of it is an embarrassment now), and I think it is high time that I took a step back and gave a little overview of some of the intellectual sources upon which I draw for my political and theological views. This may or may not be interesting, but I do feel it is important, as it gives those who come here an idea of why it is I say the things I say, and why I do not say some things people either might expect me to say or say thing people might not expect.
First, it is important to note that, intellectually speaking, there are three period in my life that shaped me more than any other. First, the period of my first year-and-a-half at Wesley Theological Seminary, where I studied systematic theology, opened me up to whole new arenas of thought, theological and philosophical, that I had not even known existed. Here, I was exposed to Jurgen Moltmann, James Cone, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and, of course, Karl Barth. I was also exposed, for the first time, to the writings of Richard Rorty and Ernst Bloch, two very different kinds of philosophers.
The second period, which corresponded to the end of my seminary career and the beginning of my married life, the spring of 1993, was the revelation I was granted by reading Isaiah Berlin's The Crooked Timber of Humanity. Moreso than any other single thing I have ever read - and I would include the Bible in this - Berlin's book opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about thinking. It also introduced me to Herder and Vico (Hamann is difficult to find in translation these days, and as I don't read German, this third source of Berlin's is still elusive).
Finally, the third period, from the fall of 1994 through the spring of 1997, was the period when I first read Thomas Kuhn. First was The Copernican Revolution, followed quickly by The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. From there, I turned to Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton, the writings of Rudolf Carnap (especially A Logical Syntax of Language), Herbert Marcuse' One Dimentsional Man, Plato and Aristotle, St. Thomas, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (I have since read several of the University of Indiana reprints of various lectures of Heidegger's but I have yet to see the new translation of B&T), Immanuel Kant (again; you can't do seminary properly without reading Kant), Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Alisdaire MacIntyre.
This list is hardly exhaustive, and it doesn't at all cover the volumes I have read since, nor does it tell the uninitiated about the content of what I have read. These volumes, however, are the spring, the source from which I start much of my thinking. I try not to belong to any "school" of thought, and I would hardly call my appropriation of any of these works uncritical. Some of them are highly critical; some, to be honest, gave voice in a systematic and clear way to unformed and nascent ideas of my own. All of them have fed me in a variety of ways, and still do, as I occasionally turn to one or another of them for solace, comfort, and even new insight (if you don't reread a really big book, then you're not trying to learn, but just showing off; the exception, of course, is Barth, whose 13 volume, yet still incomplete, Church Dogmatics I hope to finish before I shuffle off this mortal coil, but only on a first pass).
