Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Philosophy: Definiteness and dynamism

It might seem that saying things have determinate qualities undermines their dynamism, while emphasizing things dynamism of things fuzzies all the boundaries to the point where there are no things at all.

Desmond, again, demurs.  We cannot have a pure flux without any determinacy, because then “there would be no distinct center of perception (the ’self’) trying to make out things and shapes in the fog: there would be no thing in this pure indefiniteness.”  But this is not how the world comes to us:

Creation, Desmond claims, is “universal impermanence,” yet “things stand out in the flux of impermanence.  They stand out, not because they stand in the static sense, but because both they and the impermanence are determinations of the original power of being.”

Things emerge like a landscape come to shapeliness in a morning fog, but Desmond argues that “it is not right to say that the determinate was simply statically there in the indeterminate, the way supposedly a picture is ’suspended’ in the photographic negative.”  The emergence of things is a “dynamical appearing in which the constituents that compose the appearing are themselves dynamical.”  A thing comes to the foreground against a background that “helps to outline its difference,” but in this foregrounding, “neither the ‘this,’ nor the foreground nor the background are  static.”  If emergence were no more than the hidden becoming plain, there “would be no real development at all, merely the application of an extrinsic manipulation to give overtly what was always statically there covertly.”