Time has been on my mind recently. A couple of months ago in my freshman Development of Western Civilization class, Epictetus continually brought us face to face with our mortality and assured us that “death is nothing terrible.” Last week we considered Augustine’s analysis of the mystery of time in Book XI of his Confessions. But my awareness of time over the past few months has, for the most part, been more personal than academic as several interesting markers of time’s... Read more
Can I schedule an appointment for Friday? Please. I had been waiting and hoping for an email from Maria (I’ve changed her name) for the past two months. She is one of my seminar students in the required interdisciplinary course for freshmen I teach in; she sits right next to me on my left as one of fourteen students around the seminar table. Although participation is twenty-five percent of each student’s final grade, she’s never said a word. Students in... Read more
I was raised in a version of Christianity that had no sense of the liturgical year. I have often described the landmarks of my Baptist youth as Christmas, Easter, and everything else. I knew nothing of Advent until my twenties, and loved its energy, its carols, its texts–it still is my favorite liturgical season decades later. Inwardness, reflection, anticipation, and patience–Advent is for introverts. Many of my best Advent memories are related to music. Charles Harlan Clarke was the organist... Read more
Lead on King Eternal, the day of march has come Henceforth in fields of conquest Thy tents shall be our home Through days of preparation, Thy grace hath made us strong And now O King Eternal we lift our battle song. Many of the hymns of my childhood shared a common theme—we Christian believers are at war and must be prepared to do battle at any moment. From “Lead On, O King Eternal” and “Onward Christian Soldiers” through “Soldiers of... Read more
In Philosophical Fragments, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard tells a lovely story about a powerful king who falls in love with a lowly maiden. The maiden is unaware of the king’s love, and the king is worried. Knowing that love is built on equality, how is the gap between his royal greatness and her humble maidenhood to be crossed? He does not want to coerce her into loving him by revealing his love in all of its splendor, nor would elevating her to... Read more
The Advent season approaches, a season of waiting and expectation. I am rereading some of Iris Murdoch’s essays and novels in preparation for a new course next semester; a brief exchange in one of her early novels strikes me as appropriate to consider for Advent. In The Unicorn, one of Murdoch’s characters asks “Have you ever seen salmon leaping? Such fantastic bravery, to enter another element like that. Like souls approaching God.” The implications of this simile are striking. Salmon are... Read more
If we’re grownups about faith, then why can’t we all get together and lament the fact that there is no God? Christian Wiman Recently my ethics students and I have been discussing the dangers of moral certainty. For many of them, this has been a counter-intuitive conversation, given that moral principles are commonly thought to be only as good as they can be proved to be universally applicable and unassailable. Why wouldn’t we want certainty in our moral beliefs? one... Read more
When trying to describe to predominantly Catholic students the religious world that I was born into and was raised in, I sometimes tell them about our little church–Calvary Baptist–and the vehicles in the adjacent parking lot. They were mostly station wagons, the early 60s version of today’s SUVs. And many of these vehicles were sporting a bumper sticker: God Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It. And our world of faith really was that simple–or so we believed. I wrote... Read more
I have a Facebook acquaintance, a fellow graduate of St. John’s College, who posts five things she is thankful for every morning. I admire this and am always glad when I bump into her daily post on those mornings I’m on Facebook as well. It is a practice that I have told myself many times that I need to develop, but have so far have failed to do. So instead let me list a few of the things that I... Read more
We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence. . . . “Seem like we’re just set down here,” a woman said to me recently, “and don’t nobody know why.” Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Not long ago I posted the following on Facebook: What books have changed your life? I don’t mean which books do you think are “greatest” or at the top of the “Great Books” canon, but which books came... Read more
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