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If I Hadn’t Had Children…

May 8, 2013 By 4 Comments

Mother’s Day is usually a day on which other people in my life think nice things about me (I hope), or I think of my own mother (always), and yet, perhaps this year it’s time to reflect on just exactly what on earth has happened to me. There are those mothers who anticipated the delights of a house full of children from the first time, as little girls, someone put a plastic doll into their arms. I was not one of them. Then there are the mothers whose maternal instincts subtly lured them … [Read More...]

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My House: God’s Favorite Place on Earth

May 1, 2013 By Leave a Comment

(A Book Review) “Living after you have died is strange.” So Lazarus tells us. An understatement, don’t you think? Living before you have died is sometimes very strange, so after you’ve died has to be far weirder. Not many people get to tell that story. In God’s Favorite Place on Earth, though, Lazarus (via Frank Viola) does. (No matter how many near-death experiences you’ve read about, they can’t compete with Lazarus’ four-day adventure.) Lazarus’ death is one of many … [Read More...]

Becoming Neo-Pascalian: The Second Step Toward a Make-Believe Faith

April 24, 2013 By 4 Comments

I want to begin this part of the conversation acknowledging a comment to my last post about a sense of need. Nick astutely writes: My big problem with “God shaped hole” arguments is that it seems to me that I would have to accuse an awful lot of people of living in, at the very least, … [Read More...]

Becoming Neo-Pascalian: The First Step of Make-Believe Faith

April 16, 2013 By 1 Comment

We are left with this all-important question: how do we get faith? How do we “make belief”? If we’re not lucky or blessed enough to have a Damascus-road experience, and, as Pascal tells us, we can’t reason our way to faith or merely don faith like a good habit, then what? What? If indeed … [Read More...]

Making Room for the In-Laws

April 9, 2013 By 5 Comments

Marriage is the ultimate melting pot. Unless you’re one of those whose families knew each other well prior to their children marrying, if you’re married, you have probably had an experience something like mine. He was an Episcopalian; I was an Evangelical Free Churcher. He was from … [Read More...]

Easter: Tripping Over Joy

April 2, 2013 By 4 Comments

The Easter season has only just begun. It will go on for another seven weeks, and then it will go on for eternity. This poem, for me at least, captures both its magnificence and its munificence, its great grace and its hilarity. There is a laughter that comes when we are deeply relieved at having … [Read More...]

Becoming Neo-Pascalian: From Gambling Table to Altar

March 27, 2013 By Leave a Comment

One of the concepts Pascal is best known for is his Wager, a longer fragment in Pensées (f. 418). Here Pascal brings his formidable mathematical mind, operating halfway between the gambling table and the altar, to the issue of faith, and plays with probability theory in the soul. It is such a rich … [Read More...]

Loving Mrs. Turpin, Loving the Grotesque

March 19, 2013 By 2 Comments

If I were less ordinary, reading Flannery O’Connor would be more fun. As it is, I inhabit the commonplace, and she lives in a different dimension, a place, as one critic put it, of living gargoyles. This makes reading her fiction a stressful and shocking experience. I imagine that, if she knew … [Read More...]

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Becoming Neo-Pascalian: The Third Order

March 12, 2013 By 1 Comment

In our last Pascalian conversation, I left you with fire. And if you’ve had an experience like Pascal’s, perhaps you feel that all this blather about science and reason and blah, blah, blah is highly irritating. Fire is warm and bright and compelling. Science and reason is cold and comfortless. … [Read More...]

My Mother’s Morals

March 3, 2013 By 9 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom these days anyway, since it has been nearly thirty-three years to the day since I last saw her. And then I read this article: “Not Your Mother’s Morals”: A Review. And let me say up front, this post is no reflection on Jonathan Fitzgerald, his … [Read More...]

(One of) My History Hang-ups

February 27, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Any Star Trek fans out there? The Original Series? Do you remember the episode called “The City on the Edge of Forever”? No? Okay, here’s a short story, a blend of science fiction, mid-sixties silliness, and historical play: Dr. McCoy has passed through the Guardian of Forever, a portal … [Read More...]

Becoming Neo-Pascalian: Fire

February 25, 2013 By 4 Comments

When Pascal died, those who prepared his body for burial found sewn into the lining of his jacket a small piece of paper. Apparently he carried it with him everywhere he went, transferring it from jacket to jacket as they were changed, through the last eight years of his life. Clearly, this paper, … [Read More...]

Becoming Neo-Pascalian: An Indiana Jones Kind of Faith?

February 18, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Earlier we took a quick look at a scientific experiment conducted by Pascal in 1646, and we considered the ways that that experiment led him to two general “laws” of knowledge. If we want to know what is truly true, we will not rely only on what we’ve been told, and we will not rely on what … [Read More...]

Pascal, Ash Wednesday, and the Hidden God

February 12, 2013 By Leave a Comment

In the Anglican Ash Wednesday ritual, we pray for the grace of true repentance. Repentance means to turn around, which obviously means you're going to be looking in a different direction, seeing something that was "behind your back" before. And what do we see when we repent? "Jesus Christ is the … [Read More...]