Last Sunday was Saint Francis Sunday, a celebration that rivals Easter and Christmas at the Episcopal church I attend. This is because our former rector and my close friend, Marsue, is an animal fanatic and made a big deal about the Blessing of the Animals liturgy that comes around every October. My dachshund came along as she has for many years; Frieda has often accompanied me to the lectern as I read the Old Testament reading from Judges about Balaam’s ass. But today my mind... Read more
In early 1980, Isaac Asimov wrote something in a Newsweek article that has been making the rounds on social media over the past few months, something that could have been written yesterday. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” Asimov died over twenty-five years ago; I suspect that he would have adapted well to the... Read more
It is the happy life that asks more of us than we realize we have and then surprises us by enabling it in us. Joan Chittister A couple of years ago, as I prepared materials for a sabbatical book project, I looked through what, at the time, was three years worth of blog posts to find various themes for the book. One quick way to do that was to see how many times I had tagged a post with certain... Read more
My youngest son was a vet tech for a number of years and had many informed opinions about different types of animals. The stupidest animals he ever dealt with were sheep—I always knew that it is not a compliment when human beings are regularly likened to sheep in the Bible. For instance, Justin tells me that all one has to do to get a sheep to behave is to put it on its back. Once feet up, a sheep apparently believes... Read more
What is bothering me incessantly is the question of what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience—and that means the time of religion in general. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters from Prison One day a couple of springs ago, I spent a day as an outside reviewer for the Liberal... Read more
What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent in the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves. Christopher Wiman The other day while at the grocery store I was surveying the vast array of Keurig coffee possibilities on display. Among the offerings was something from a San Francisco based company called “Fog... Read more
The stereotype of the Type A personality has become an entrenched part of cultural lore. Originally described by two cardiologists in the 1950s as the type of person who is most likely to experience cardiac arrest, Type As are familiar to everyone. Competitive, short-fused, action oriented, no nonsense, humorless, deadline driven, boundless in energy—these are people who not only don’t stop to smell the roses, but tend not even to notice the existence of the roses as they plow through... Read more
I was born into a world in which preference-expression was a highly evolved art form with the most important stakes imaginable. This high-stakes art form is called prayer. It has always been a mystery to me. I have always claimed that a college professor’s teaching and research should feed each other and have tried to live that out, with occasional success. That teaching and research can be mutually supporting is a challenging enough idea for many academics. But supposing that the... Read more
This semester I have the privilege of teaching Philosophy of Knowledge, a favorite course that for various reasons I have not had the opportunity to teach for several years. Last week we began studying Plato, perhaps the greatest philosopher in the Western tradition. Alfred North Whitehead famously suggested that the Western tradition in philosophy “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”–this is nowhere more true than with Plato’s understanding of the human person. Indeed, Plato’s model of human nature not... Read more
One year ago I posted the essay below on the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11. Never forget. Everyone beyond a certain age can remember clearly what they were doing fifteen years ago tomorrow when they heard the news. I was in my college’s main cafeteria getting coffee and noticed something weird happening on the Today Show broadcast on a television hanging from the ceiling in the corner. At that point all they knew was that one of the Twin Towers was on fire,... Read more
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