I will be receiving the copyedited version of my book A Year of Faith and Philosophy back from my editor in a couple of weeks–copyediting is an important step, since it means that the content of your book has passed editorial muster. The copyeditor is simply the grammar and punctuation Nazi who doesn’t care about the content at all. Since I’ve been doing this for a while and serve as the grammar and punctuation Nazi for my students all the time,... Read more
Today I simply want to share something brief that I heard on a podcast a couple of days ago. Many of us–most, perhaps–are stressed about the upcoming election. In my case, at least, there are byproducts of this stress that don’t “seem like me.” I find myself, for instance, feeling very judgmental toward the millions of people who are just as entrenched in their belief about who must be the next president–but they disagree with me about who that person... Read more
What would happen if we actually took the things we claim to believe seriously enough to do something about them? Seriously enough to completely change our lives? Katie is a “good person”—doctor for the National Health Service, mother, wife, and socially aware—but is desperately unhappy with her life. Her husband David is angry and cynical; he writes a newspaper column called “The Angriest Man in Holloway” in which he pillories everything from old people who walk too slowly getting off... Read more
In one month the most consequential Presidential election of our lifetimes will take place. People are already voting by mail, and all indications is that we may not know the winner for days after. Everyone is nervous, many are jaded, others have lost hope. A few thoughts about self-care are in order. Early in her 2018 book Almost Everything, Anne Lamott describes what an older woman in the midst of a twelve-step recovery program once told her. One of the... Read more
One of the teaching teammates I have taught with for the last half-dozen years is a Victorian literature scholar. This, of course, includes Charles Dickens. Her choice from Dickens for the syllabus often is the über-familiar A Christmas Carol; she gave two lectures on this text earlier this week. A Christmas Carol in late September/early October might seem anachronistic, but the text is about far more than a particular time of year. Its moral themes are both timeless and remarkably... Read more
Next week in the interdisciplinary program I teach in will be “Social Gospel” week. Students will read Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum for Tuesday lecture, then essays from Herbert Spencer and Andrew Carnegie, as well as the introduction to Walter Rauschenbusch’s 1917 book A Theology for the Social Gospel for Thursday seminar. Rauschenbusch was one of the most important voices of the social gospel movement in the early 20th century, a movement within Protestantism that applied Christian ethics to social... Read more
Today’s lectionary reading from the Jewish scriptures is from Numbers. We find the liberated Israelites in the desert, and they are complaining—again. God has miraculously provided them with a daily supply of manna to keep them from starving, but everyone is pining for the wonderful variety of food they remember eating in Egypt. We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength... Read more
Over the years that I have been writing this blog, those who describe themselves as non-believers or atheists have frequently expressed regular confusion and frustration about the same issue. It usually goes something like this: “How can someone who seems to be relatively normal and intelligent believe in something without any evidence?” I don’t get defensive when asked this and similar questions—I don’t want to be that sort of Christian. I often reply by suggesting that there is evidence to... Read more
It is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for a [non-Christian] to hear a Christian, supposedly giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these [scientific] topics, and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people reveal vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. One guess as to who wrote the above. Most likely a progressive Christian denying the authority of the Bible, right? How about this one? Darwin taught us... Read more
In Psalm 1, one of the psalm options in today’s lectionary readings, the righteous are described as being “like trees planted by streams of water . . . in all that they do, they prosper.” We can learn a great deal about spiritual health and growth from trees. There are two kinds of living things, distinguished by the strategies they have developed in response to perceived threat and danger. One kind responds to danger by running away from it, developing... Read more
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