Hello,
My name is Julian Waldner, I am a Hutterite from the prairies of Manitoba, Canada.
Several years ago, when I was more ambitious, I would wake up at 6 and have coffee with Kierkegaard. It was these early morning forays into Kierkegaard’s tome, Concluding Unscientific Postscript that led to this blog. Reading Kierkegaard led me to think in new ways about Christianity, and I turned to this blog to think through those new thoughts. Many of my early posts are focused on Kierkegaard as I wrestled with the implications of his thought. I thought about Kierkegaard’s conception of faith, his critique of apologetics, the scandal of the incarnation, and Kierkegaard’s critique of Christendom. I must admit that I cringe when I read some of my earlier posts, but I suspect I will cringe at my most recent ones in the future as well.
Since then, I’ve moved on from writing only about Kierkegaard, and this blog has been the place to think through the thought of other thinkers I’ve read: Stanley Hauerwas, Karl Barth, Charles Taylor, Jacques Ellul, and more. (See this page for some of my recommended reading) I’ve written book reviews, check out my multi-part series on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age or my review of Alan Kreider’s book The Patient Ferment of the Early Church. I’ve written movie reviews of movies like The Joker or Silence. I’m not a pastor, but I’ve written sermons, a very interesting and fun genre to write! I sometimes post essays that I originally wrote for my university studies, such as this one on technology and prayer. Some pieces have come out of events in my personal life, such as this piece written after my father’s death, this one written after my cousin’s suicide, and this one after the death of my aunt. In a different sense, I think of everything I’ve written as deeply personal.
My writing on this blog is usually about spiritual, theological or philosophical topics, often with an eye to sociology, culture, and politics. I write as a Hutterite—albeit an eclectic one who draws from a variety of sources—and my Hutterite theology and culture occasionally shows up in my essays. There is this piece I wrote on the Hutterite vision of community of goods, this one written on the Hutterite response to the pandemic (a piece that fits well into a certain genre of Christian response to the pandemic early on), and there are scattered references to Hutterites throughout my pieces. I recently had an article published in Plough Quarterly which is the most ‘Hutterite’ piece I’ve written yet, readers should consult that to see how I fit into the Hutterite world. Some key themes and questions that keep preoccupying me on this blog include: The nature of Christian freedom, grace, truth, faith, doubt and uncertainty, Anabaptism, Christian community, the relationship between Christianity and politics, the question of technology, modernity, our secular age, and more.
I think of what I’m trying to do on this blog as an attempt to make a home for myself in words. On this blog, I am trying to make sense of the worlds I find myself in—our secular, modern age, and my traditional Hutterite world—as one who has been claimed for Christ’s kingdom of peace.
I hope my blog makes you think in new directions. If you have any questions or comments I would love to hear from you. You can reach out to me on the contact page of this blog.
“Julian laying the smack down in vintage Christian style” – Commenter on Blog
Coffee with Kierkegaard 