Forging Ploughshares

Paul Axton preaches: Jesus declares he will only provide the sign of Jonah, which is a new structuring of signs and language, built not on the word of man but the Logos of God. 

(Sign up for the reading course with Ethan Vanderleek. Oct 31, 2026 – Dec 13, 2026, on William Desmond's Being and the Between here:  https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/schedule)

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Brad and Paul discuss Anthony Bartlett's book, Love's Entanglement, which shows how the later Girard gave up on his theory and the power of revelation, and how early Girard was apocalyptic in his understanding of revelation. Failing to delineate these two sides of Girard has given us the sick Girardianism prevailing in this political and cultural moment.

(Sign up for the reading course with Ethan Vanderleek. Oct 31, 2026 – Dec 13, 2026, on William Desmond's Being and the Between here:  https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/schedule)

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Paul Axton preaches: the means of sorting out the violent image of God from the nonviolent is the rule of faith, which is the spearhead for rightly dividing Scripture and the world according to the Gospel of Peace.

Sign up for the reading course with Ethan Vanderleek. Oct 31, 2026 – Dec 13, 2026, on William Desmond's Being and the Between here:  https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/schedule

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John Ashworth, missionary, priest, and peacemaker, in some of the most violent parts of Africa describes his conclusion that nonviolence is the only hope. You can read about John's journey in his autobiography Journeying Towards Nonviolence: My Life in Sudan. 

(Sign up for the reading course with Ethan Vanderleek. Oct 31, 2026 – Dec 13, 2026, on William Desmond's Being and the Between here:  https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/schedule)

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Paul Axton preaches: Paul's version of Christus Victor is not focused on either the law or the devil, but the defeat of the dynamic of sin, or a way of seeing all things through the mind of Christ or what he calls the rule of faith. 

(Sign up for the course, Sin and Salvation, touching upon the apocalyptic new hermeneutic involved in a nonviolent reading of God and atonement. The course will run from the third week of October to the second week of December. Sign up here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/ and then go to current c...

Jonathan Heaps describes to Paul and Brad the rise among Catholics attempting to take control of government and governmental institutions and like Chad Pecknold, to be the voice for violence in this administration.

(Sign up for the course, Sin and Salvation, touching upon the apocalyptic new hermeneutic involved in a nonviolent reading of God and atonement. The course will run from the third week of October to the second week of December. Sign up here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/ and then go to current course offerings.)

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Paul Axton preaches: Romans 7:7ff presents Paul's version of the defeat of sin, which is a deconstruction of the serpent or the devil and the law, and a victory over the dynamics of a deception. 

(Sign up for the course, Sin and Salvation, touching upon the apocalyptic new hermeneutic involved in a nonviolent reading of God and atonement. The course will run from the third week of October to the second week of December. Sign up here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/ and then go to current course offerings.)

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Brian Sartor, through long engagement with Douglas Campbell's picture of the false teacher Paul is deconstructing in Romans 1:18ff, broadens this understanding to the Bible and this cultural moment to suggest Paul is deconstructing the common foundation shared by the world.

(Sign up for the course, Sin and Salvation, touching upon the apocalyptic new hermeneutic involved in a nonviolent reading of God and atonement. The course will run from the third week of October to the second week of December. Sign up here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/ and then go to current course offerings.)

If...

Paul Axton preaches: The first obligation of the church is to be the church, to be Christian, and not as the MAGA New Right envisions through regime change, revolutionizing the judiciary, and creating a sovereign power in Trump.

(The upcoming course Sin and Salvation, touching upon an apocalyptic  hermeneutic involved in a nonviolent reading of God and atonement will run from the third week of October to the first week of December. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/ and then go to current course offerings.)

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Brad and Paul discuss the MAGA New Right, and describe the upcoming course on sin and salvation, touching upon the apocalyptic new hermeneutic involved in a nonviolent reading of God and atonement. The course will run from the third week of October to the second week of December. Sign up here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/ and then go to current course offerings.)

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Paul Axton Preaches: The Trump administration is filled with devout Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians, and yet the religion on display in this administration and its supporters aligns with an evil cruelty, worse than atheistic nihilism, which can only be countered by a recovery of the metaphysical seriousness of God revealed in Christ.

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Anthony Bartlett continues to unfold his nonviolent reading of God and Scripture in a comparison of Job and Deuteronomy, in which Job gives voice to the nonviolent, non-retributive, understanding of God, posed against the retributive justice of his friends as found in Deuteronomy. 

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Paul Axton preaches: The alternative to 9/11 and the threat of nuclear war is that the meek alone will inherit the Earth. Violent conquest through nuclear destruction points to the singular solution.

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David, Jonathan, and Paul, discuss the profound influence of Wendell Berry on each of us in realizing the spiritual sense of place and belonging, addressing also alienation, racism, waywardness, and the redemptive grace made available in friendship.

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Paul Axton Preaches: The particular expression of spiritual rootedness found in Wendell Berry and Dolly Parton is an entry into the meaning of universal salvation.

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Anthony Bartlett provides a Girardian reading of Genesis and Exodus, in which the Hebrew people are formed from oppressed outcasts, and in which liberation from violence and oppression, through the experience of Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, and the experience of Abraham, provides for the formation of the nonviolence pictured in creation and culminating in Christ.

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Paul Axton preaches: There is an apocalyptic logic laid out in the New Testament, which the Lutheran notion of justification misses, in which there is a crisis and implosion, an attempt to silence God, and it is from the midst of this attempt to destroy him that Christ speaks. 

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Anthony Bartlett explains to Brad and Paul the significance of Benoît Chantre, the biographer and last key conversation partner with René Girard with whom the book Battling to the End, Girard's last word. Chantre attempts to direct Girard away from a dark apocalypticism toward what he calls an intimate mediation in Christ.

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Paul Axton preaches: Paul describes the "end of the law" which is "nailed to the cross" and "set aside" along with the power of the "rulers and authorities" so that a fulness of Paul's reading gets beyond Luther's constricted understanding of grace and faith which are still functioning on the basis of the law.

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Brad and Paul discuss how Slavoj Žižek Extends the insights of René Girard, providing a deep reading of the problem of the law, accounting for Luther's depression, in spite of his discovery of "justification."

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Brad and Paul discuss the sermon that follows, showing that the Lutheran connection between Paul and the Law, often portrayed in a Lutheran-like conversion, misconstrues Judaism and the Law, and missed the apocalyptic failure and salvation Paul is portraying. 

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Anthony Bartlett explains to Paul and Brad the culmination of his work in Love's Entanglement: God as Nonviolent Relation and How That Brings the World to Peace. 

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Paul Axton preaches: This sermon follows the sacrificial stages in the life of Harry Truman as a prototype of the seeming necessity of the apocalyptic religion into which Christ intervenes. 

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Paul Axton preaches: Jesus claim to Thomas and Philip that they can see and know God in him, that he is the way and the truth and the life, call for a holistic understanding which has been disrupted by modernism but which is approached through Sophiology.

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Anthony Bartlett and Brad and Paul discuss the dropping of the bombs on Japan in light of the Girardian insight into the scapegoating mechanism, and Girard's turn from total condemnation of sacrifice due to the influence of Raymund Schwager, and the entry of Peter Thiel and JD Vance.

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Anthony Bartlett traces the rise of semiotics and the understanding that before being there is the sign, and that reality comes to us through a sign system of violence which will be exposed and displaced by the semiotic shift of the Logos.

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Brad and Paul discuss the convergence of William Desmond's understanding of the potencies of the ethical with Paul's depiction of the fruits of the Spirit, both of which would displace ethical systems with ethical realities.

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Anthony Bartlett traces the impact of the theory of Ferdinand de Saussure and Levi Strauss on the rise of structuralism and the deconstruction of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and René Girard, giving rise to a clear split between two notions of Logos.

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Paul Axton preaches: In Corinthians Paul contrasts human and divine wisdom and pictures the cross as the divide between the two, focusing on the absolute transcendence and immanence of Christ, not as a dualism, but as synthesizing these seeming antinomies, which is the continued project of the Christian life in theosis.

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Brad and Paul discuss the convergence of the work of William Desmond with that of Sergius Bulgakov, noting that Desmond's work can be read as on a continuum through Maximus, Hegel, and Bulgakov, which is perhaps the most serious contemporary attempt to think out philosophically and theologically the implications of the Gospel.

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Paul Axton preaches: Is the analogia entis the anti-Christ or is there the possibility of a renewed natural theology and metaphysics?

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Brad and Paul discuss the anti-metaphysical stance of René Girard as compared to William Desmond's renewal of metaphysics, with each bringing a necessary critique to modern metaphysics and surpassing this metaphysic in two needed but perhaps contrasting understandings.

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Paul Axton preaches: Behind this sermon on the fall and summing up of all things in Christ, including everything about the first Adam, is the approach to metaphysics found in William Desmond and Anthony Bartlett. The orientation of a sick metaphysics (Girard and Bartlett) provides the possibility of redemption or the realization of the fulness of metaphysics (Desmond), or the synthesis found in Christ.

From Spiritual Sickness to Divinization

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Anthony Bartlett explains Heidegger's turn to language in place of a philosophical metaphysics, and locates language as the origin integral to being and the essential nature of violence. 

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Paul Axton preaches: This sermon traces universal restoration (apokatastasis) and recapitulation, in the way this transforms human thought in the explanation of Origen, Maximus and Eriugena, and illustrated in the case of Peter.

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In this new series of podcasts with Anthony Bartlett, Anthony systematically introduces his extension of the Girardian system into theology and biblical studies. In this first lecture he describes the rise of meaning in the scapegoat and the semiotic shift introduced by Christ.

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Paul Axton preaches: This sermon brings together Paul's picture of creation ex-nihilo and resurrection as the thought behind his notion of epektasis or being stretched out, in the sense of going beyond the self, as further developed by William Desmond in conjunction with John Scotus Eriugena.

(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

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William Desmond introduces his metaxological philosophy and its implications for religion, ethics and aesthetics.

(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

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Paul Axton preaches: This sermon develops John Behr's understanding of the Logos along with William Desmond's picture of the betweenness of the intimate universal.

(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

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In this final class with David Dawson, David answers key question regarding Christ's recovery of language as the Word, the exposure of the victim, and the overcoming of religion.  

(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

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