Are professional sports good for a community or for us? I think so, maybe. A critic, but a good faith one, suggests that I am quite wrong. Steve Baughman, lawyer and gadfly (in the good way!), argued that professional sports fandom is quite bad, for the Republic and for us. His argument was interesting, but I thought it failed philosophically and practically. Now I am excited to present a response to my defense of the good done by professional sports fandom. Following... Read more
Pundits are paid to opine, so opine they must. I am not a pundit, but a culturally observant person who is often asked: “How is ‘it’ going?” When this is not about the revolution in higher education, then the “it” is a reference to the 2020 Presidential election. I no longer write about what I wish would happen, given my other work, but I do try to keep up with what is likely to happen. After all, the next administration will rule... Read more
A vampire sucks the blood of the living, but only to stay undead: the perfect image of the ideologue, the man with unreal ideas. Dracula is in part a myth based on the very real conflict between the world as it is and the artificial world that ignores half of reality. The horrors begin when our carefully cultivated, college credentialed worldview clashes with truth. Think for a moment. We, all of us, begin conscious: we are. We experience, interpret and understand the world... Read more
Halloween, All Hallows’, is coming and, being Christian, we are preparing to pray and party. Why? All Hallows’ Eve is a celebration, deeply Christian, a holiday of creative mothers, when adults party, and devils are defeated, when we are unafraid, awash in love. This is a day in the West of the World where we face common fears and cross ourselves and have a laugh. I have visited many holy places where the dead, skulls, bones, and the incorrupt, are there to see. The... Read more
God give me better questions so I can love You better. The way forward is always to ask questions, take tentative answers, never lose contact with the “not knowing” that is part of loving the Beloved Unknown. The tentative nature of any of our answers is part of faithful living, orthodoxy as a window to deeper questions about what still is unknown even with our deeply held, if still provisional, answers. Socrates lived a life seeking the Divine by questioning... Read more
Sometimes a work is so beautiful that you forget what is being said by the author for the sheer sound, the feeling of the words sliding through the mind, and collecting together building something magnificent: a monument of sound, words made music or mayhap music frozen in prose. John Milton does this to words. There are lines, whole sections, in Paradise Lost that are cathedrals in words. They are not cathedrals of a church I would wish to attend, the theology is... Read more
Being a Packer Fan Has Been Very, Very Good for Me. Maybe. Pro-sports fandom has been, for me, a school where my intellect learned to guide my passions. Packer fandom has been a school for my soul, a way of making lifelong friends, and good merriment. Maybe. Maybe not. Being a fan may be fine, but being a fanatic is not, ever. Nothing so ruins a good thing than a zealot: Jesus turns zealots into students. Ask Simon, once zealot,... Read more
One purpose of this space is to provide a place for “guest voices. . .” How does a person become a guest voice? I think they have interesting ideas, which is not a great selection mechanism, but the one I use! Steve Baughman is a sometimes online interlocutor who keeps theists honest (or attempts to do so!) and has interesting ideas. Often those ideas are the opposite of my own thoughts, but that is the wonder of the dialectic! Attack theism,... Read more
God is good and life is in God’s hands, so Scripture teaches and William Shakespeare believed. He knew, Hamlet shows he knew, the pain of life and reasons to doubt Providence. Yet Shakespeare was not just the author of tragedy but of divine comedy. As a Christian, he knew that human history ends in a wedding between God and humankind, punctuated by the tragic mistakes we make and that happen to us. A comedy like As You Like It has profound parts, but... Read more
It is clear then that the essential object of love, or the Beloved, is “whatever.” So said Professor Alfred Geier,* but if we pause and understand, then a life changing truth will result. Over a lifetime Plato reflected on the life of Socrates and discovered a few essential truths about humankind. These ideas have been disputed and those disputes are the footnotes to philosophy.** In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates and the tragic poet Agathon are discussing “love.” What is love? Both realize that there exists... Read more
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