I was reminded by email a couple of days ago that it has been a decade since one of my good friends died. Ivan Kauffman and I were only friends for five or six years, but he made an indelible impression on my life in many ways. Here’s the essay I wrote at the end of July as I travelled by train to Philadelphia for his funeral and memorial service. Monday morning–early. The 30th Street Amtrak station in Philadelphia is... Read more
Anyone who has ever stepped inside a Catholic church more than once for a mass that includes music has undoubtedly heard “On Eagle’s Wings.” I’m not Catholic, and “On Eagle’s Wings” is far from my favorite sacred song, but I do have a history with it. “On Eagle’s Wings” is a tune from the Catholic charismatic renewal movement of the 1970s and 80s. I became aware of such music from my wife Jeanne shortly after we got together in the... Read more
The Proper 10 Year C gospel from Luke is one of Jesus’s most beloved parables. Is there any parable more familiar than the story of the Good Samaritan? And is there any parable whose message is more difficult to live out? Jesus uses the story to illustrate mercy, the second virtue in the prophet Micah’s directive to “do justice, love kindness/mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” Jesus agrees with the man who concludes that the true neighbor in the... Read more
One of my most effective attention-getters in any given class is to point out to a bunch of 18-21 years olds that unless there is a major breakthrough in medical technology in the next few decades, we know one thing to be true with certainty. Within 100 years, everyone in this classroom will be dead. Mortality is an inexcapable feature of being human, a feature that I’ve been thinking about more recently. One of the few remaining vestiges of my... Read more
Jeanne was away for most of the last ten days with her sister in Brooklyn who is dealing with some serious medical issues. Finding myself alone with Bovina in the summer is different. During the school year I always have work piling up, classes to prepare for, meetings to attend, and grading to do. But my courses for the fall are already set to go, I just finished going through the draft of my next book one more time, and... Read more
Today’s reading from the Jewish scriptures contains many powerful lessons that remain relevant thousands of years later, including some important truths about faith, human nature, and class distinctions. Along the way, it also shows how important it is to listen to the people in your life, even those whom you doubt have anything important to say. Naaman was a powerful and important man, the head general of the armies of the king of Syria to the north of the kingdom... Read more
Christianity, or any branch of it, loses its Christian character when its self-proclaimed supporters outnumber and outshout its actual adherents.~Marilynne Robinson Is the United States a Christian nation? Attempts to answer this disputed question usually focus on specific language in the founding documents of the United States, quotations from the correspondence and essays of the Founding Fathers, what percentage of the citizenry identifies as “Christian,” and individual interpretations of history. It’s a familiar debate in which the various sides tend... Read more
I ran an informal experiment on Facebook not long ago, the point of which was to see how quickly it would take people to get upset and defensive over something that, arguably, is not worth getting upset or defensive about. It’s shocking how easily I can be entertained, especially when seeking to avoid more important things that I should be doing or thinking about. I posted that There are two kinds of people. People who back into parking spots and... Read more
Throughout the gospel lectionary readings in Ordinary Time, Jesus regularly says surprising things that contradict our traditional notions of proper ethical behavior. Here’s a section from my forthcoming book A Year of Faith and Philosophy that explores this issue. The gospel readings during Ordinary Time regularly include difficult teachings from Jesus. For instance, in the Proper 7 Year A reading from Matthew [last week], Jesus says that I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against... Read more
Some time ago I read the first few pages of Greg Epstein’s Good without God. Epstein is the Humanist chaplain at Harvard University; Jeanne gave me a heads up after she heard him being interviewed on NPR. I appreciated the first few pages of Epstein’s introduction, where he takes the new atheists to task for their failure to take religious belief seriously, but it was Epstein’s definition of God that fully caught my attention. Humanists believe that God is the... Read more
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