One of my prized possessions, purchased when Jeanne and I were on vacation during Summer 2018 in Scotland, is a Harris Tweed wool cap. I bought it in a small shop in Oban, a beautiful port on the west coast of Scotland that is the gateway to the Hebrides islands (where they make Islay scotch whisky, the real reason we went to Scotland in the first place). I wear this cap to work frequently, and am pleased to report that... Read more
One of the downsides of the liturgical calendar is that, since it runs in a three year cycle (A, B, and C), some of my favorite gospel stories only show up in the Sunday lectionary once every three years. Today is no exception. The Year C Third Sunday of Easter gospel reading from John is an important one, with Jesus performing a post-resurrection miracle and having an important conversation with Peter. But the Year A Third Sunday after Easter gospel... Read more
I tend to have a difficult time falling and/or staying asleep at night when Jeanne is away. She’s been away the past week for work—I’ve found that sometimes playing a podcast on relatively low volume on my phone often puts me to sleep within ten minutes. My phone automatically shifts to an unplayed episode of either the same podcast or one of the other twenty or so podcasts I have bookmarked and listen to semi-regularly. I usually partially wake up... Read more
There may be no need to reconcile all one’s beliefs with all one’s other beliefs—no need to attempt to see reality steadily and as a whole. Perhaps our beliefs can be compartmentalized, so that there is no need, for example, to reconcile one’s regular attendance at Mass with one’s work as an evolutionary biologist. Richard Rorty This passage was part of the final essay that my American Philosophy students and I considered in our final class of the semester yesterday.... Read more
Doubt is Next to Godliness Last Friday’s post imagined a conversation between Karl Marx and Jesus in which they discuss a passage or two from Richard Rorty’s essay “Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hope,” an essay that just happened to be the focus of class discussion in my American Philosophy class last week. Why “Christian Socialism” is not an oxymoron One of Rorty’s many interesting and controversial claims in that essay is that “We should read [The Communist Manifesto and the... Read more
We should read the New Testament as saying that how we treat each other on earth matters a great deal more than the outcome of debate concerning the existence or nature of another world. Richard Rorty, “Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes” One of the final texts we will be studying in my American Philosophy course that finishes next week is by Richard Rorty, an influential American pragmatist philosopher from the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century. In his essay “Failed Prophecies,... Read more
I was, as were billions of other people, saddened to hear the news of Pope Francis I’s passing yesterday. As a non-Catholic who has taught in Catholic higher education for thirty-five years and who has dozens of Catholic colleagues and friends, I’ve always paid closeattention to this Argentinian Jesuit who seemed to be very different from the string of popes since John XXIII who was pope when I was born. According to the search engine on my blog platform, Francis... Read more
Easter is the celebration of the promise of hope, the promise of new life, that surely after darkness there is light, and that within the deepest betrayals lie the possibilities of forgiveness. Yet as Barbara Johnson writes, “[W]e are Easter people living in a Good Friday world,” a world that provides more Good Friday moments on a daily basis. Eventually the joy of Easter and what follows in its wake fades. What then? The lectionary texts for Easter Sunday and... Read more
Holy Saturday reminds us that we are mortal and that we all will die. Quoting the Book of Job, the Holy Saturday liturgy reminds us that [m]ortals die, and are laid low . . . As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, so mortals lie down and do not rise again; until the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused out of their sleep. Those who loved and followed... Read more
The gospel reading for the Good Friday liturgy from John’s gospel begins with Jesus’s arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane and ends with Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus preparing Jesus’s body for burial and placing it in a tomb. Many Christmas Eves ago, Jeanne, our youngest son Justin, and I were invited to share dinner with a friend from work and her family, which included two precocious and very active children. On display was a beautiful crèche that contained all... Read more
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