Never trust the person best known for what he is against. There was, family legend asserts, a man opposed to everything. If you enjoyed a thing, say a hairstyle, he would be sure to see in the bob a sign of coming evils. He worried about holidays, Christmas pageants, and “the evil blue light.” This was a television set in the days when television screens consisted of a big tube and were black and white. Wherever he went, he saw... Read more
What is the beloved? What does Plato mean when he speaks of the known unknown, the beloved, the One we love without knowing His name? Plato never, quite, says. He knows this love is most divine, but Plato never quite calls the object of all our desires “God.” How could he? The gods of Homer and traditional Greek religion were not worthy of worship. If Plato cleaned them up, and he tried, then he had cleaned them up. The Zeus... Read more
Happy Birthday Papaw. If I put the big, brown, corduroy pillow on the floor behind Papaw’s chair, I had my own snug little room. I could hear everything the grownups were saying, but was not in the way or as likely to be sent to bed, a great terror when one is a boy. Granny would have served a wonderful dinner, but we generally did not snack on the living room carpet. However, there was always a candy dish with... Read more
Absolute romance finds a Beloved worth absolute commitment. The good God needs nothing, so when God decides to love us, we need only give consent to find joy. This is the good news: God is there, came in the person of Jesus Christ, and reveals Himself to us each week in His Body and Blood. We can see Him. We can see the True Light. Nothing can stop the true Light when the people of God, the beloved community, gather together.... Read more
On the road to Emmaus, the newly risen Lord Jesus came to two of His followers. They were going home in anguish. Jesus loved his friends and could have met their immediate need. He wished them to be happy, but He hid himself. Why? Scriptures say the two disciples were communing, talking, arguing with each other about all that had happened. They were trying to make sense of what they had believed about Jesus and what had happened. If Jesus... Read more
Write a great book and you are still likely to throw out a dumb aside comment. A temptation in reading older books is to find something quirky or false in them, even a widely shared belief, and place that quirky belief on par with the central argument in the book or writing. Saint Clement uses the phoenix as a natural example of “resurrection.” This is not his best moment, but never fails to revive the interest of a Harry Potter reader. If you... Read more
Black Americans liberated themselves. The moment that there was a possibility of freedom, enslaved Americans took history in hand and fought. With John Brown, they fought against all odds. When Union armies arrived in slave states, black Americans forced those armies to deal with the real cause of the war. They refused to let the war of rebellion be about “union” or “states rights” or any other abstraction. They placed their own bodies on the line for liberty. Hundreds of... Read more
We should not believe unreasonable things. Few disagree, certainly not the God of the Bible. We cannot, never can, should not believe stuff just because we wish the stuff to be true. That is a good way to end up with a pile of stuff and no truth. That’s not too controversial either. The just man wants the truth: eternal, unchanging. Regrettably, we are broken, the cosmos is broken, what “is” is not quite what it should be. If we... Read more
Hope works in our faculty nursery at the School and College. She has seen our own kids and many other children develop. I have gotten to be Dad and watch our children. I get to see what she sees as she teaches. A child is full of wonder and love inspired by beauty. Bring the big red fire truck into the nursery and little Bea will wish to ride wearing her pink tutu. She wants to learn about this awesome,... Read more
I have grown old talking about beauty. When I began, I was a relatively young man or at least young enough looking to pass as one. No longer. I am, as I write, in what my Mom calls “the youth of old age.” That is another way of saying “old” Sometimes when I see myself, that makes me sad and reminds me of what my Nana used to say when she herself in an unguarded moment in the mirror: “Who... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In