At the beginning of a new year, I often find myself thinking not so much about the year just ended, but rather about the year just begun. Although it was a perfectly fine year on a personal level—my youngest son got engaged, I signed a contract for a new book, Jeanne and I went to Scotland on vacation, and many more positives—2018 was eminently forgettable from a national and global perspective. But I am an incurable optimist, so I hope... Read more
Last May, Are Evangelical Christians Discriminated Against? The Dangers of Tribal Christianity Read more
I read a fascinating article in the November 2018 edition of The Atlantic that explores the various ways in which virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri have begun to occupy more and more important spaces in our lives. My household does not have such an assistant, and it’s probably a good thing. Home is the one place where my conversation tends to be unfiltered. I read the article largely because, as a person with no virtual assistant, I have often wondered... Read more
Not long ago I led a seminar with a number of colleagues from the Honors Program as part of a two-day end-of-the-semester workshop. Our text was several essays from Michel de Montaigne, a sixteenth-century diplomat, philosopher, and introvert who has become one of my favorite authors over the past few years. My general tendency, both as a philosopher and as a normal human being, is toward the details rather than grand, sweeping schemes, and toward skepticism rather than certainty. Montaigne speaks... Read more
On this New Year’s Day I’m taking a final moment to look back at the year just finished. 2018 was my first full calendar year blogging on Patheos (although this blog is now well over six years old). Here, according to Google Analytics, are my top five posts from 2018! 5: Several news outlets called the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination hearings the top news story of 2018–my October reflections on that process came in at #5: Doctor Ford, Judge... Read more
Love does not say “I ought to love”—it loves. Pity does not say “It is right to feel pity”—it pities. Justice does not say, “I am bound to be just”—it acts justly. George Eliot There are eight to ten movies that Jeanne and I watch religiously during the Christmas season, from the obvious (“It’s a Wonderful Life,” “White Christmas”) to a few that are not as well-known. We began our annual Christmas movie-watching binge this year with one of the lesser... Read more
On Christmas Eve morning, I noticed that a Facebook friend had posted a poll on her site. The question was: Which is more meaningful to you—Christmas or Easter? While many respondents commented that their vote was based on which of the two seasons they found more entertaining or less stressful, the most interesting comments were from those who made their choice on what these two holidays mean to them as persons of Christian faith. The underlying faith question is: Which... Read more
This Christmas season seems more dissonant than most, with violence across the globe, a partial governmental shutdown, and jostling for air space with department store muzak and familiar stories from the pulpit. During a conversation with a number of friends the other day I was reminded that the juxtaposition of promise and death, of expectation and suffering, is nothing new. This dissonance is built into the fabric of the stories that we tend to tell selectively and sanitize for public... Read more
Christmas movies are a big deal at my house. Jeanne goes for the classics, such as “Miracle on 34th Street,” “The Bishop’s Wife,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and (her favorite) “White Christmas.” Those are all fine (except “White Christmas,” which I can take or leave), but I tend to favor more recent ones, like “The Holiday” and (my favorite) “The Nativity Story.” Movies with Biblical themes were both attractive and problematic in my early years. We did not go to movies,... Read more
I have a colleague and friend with whom I share a lot in common. Eric and I are both “Johnnies,” graduates of the St. John’s College Great Books curriculum (he graduated a few years before I did back in the 1970s). We share the same scholarly interests; he was an outside reader on one of my books, as I was on one of his a few years later. And we are both hardcore Protestants. Eric is an ordained Presbyterian minister who... Read more
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