Truth isn’t sympathetic to our need for certainty or stability. Jared Enns, “The Bible for Normal People” There is a self-described atheist who regularly comments on this blog, usually to express his strong disagreement with suggestions that a conception of God might be something more than a myth or fairy tale. His most recent comment was in response to an essay I posted around Christmas titled “Why the Details of Jesus’ Birth Don’t Matter.” He observed that So, at least... Read more
Yesterday I had a very encouraging conversation with an editor from a publishing company who has expressed strong interest in one of my two sabbatical book projects: For Everything There is a Season: An Outsider’s Journey through the Liturgical Year. Keep your fingers crossed–if everything works out in the best way possible, this might actually be in print this year. For today’s post, here is a shortened version of the proposed introduction to that book (the whole introduction is about twice... Read more
Today’s gospel gets us back to the basics. Sports fans old enough to remember the 70s and 80s will recall that a regular occurrence at baseball or football games either in person or on television was, when the camera panned the stands, to see a person—often wearing a colorful fright wig—holding up a large homemade poster board sign with a cryptic reference that made sense only for initiates: John 3:16. I often imagined the confusion that many might have felt... Read more
In the opening lines of Genesis we are told that “In the beginning . . . the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.” Then God says, “Let there be light!” and creation gets rolling. It’s not at all difficult to conclude that, from the very start, God prefers light to darkness; a multitude of passages from scripture to come bear this out. This seminal account of the interplay between light and... Read more
Tomorrow is my birthday (#68)–the fact that my youngest son finds a way to travel from Colorado annually to help Jeanne and me celebrate the auspicious event indicates that birthdays are still a big deal in our house. Permit me in this post to ramble a a bit as I mark yet another orbit around the sun. This year Justin scheduled his flights so his eight-day visit would have the last two Friars home games as bookends, so perhaps the... Read more
Next week is my birthday week, an annual opportunity for me to consider how old I have become. I have been the senior member in terms of experience at the college in my philosophy department for the past three or four years–and I’m pretty sure I’m the oldest in years as well (the other candidate is on sabbatical so I can’t ask him how old he is). We have three new faculty memers in our department this year and I... Read more
This has been a challenging week in class, not because of my students but because of the topics we are studying. On Monday I spent two hours in seminar with thirteen honors students considering Sartre’s play No Exit and Camus’ extended essay The Myth of Sisyphus which begins with the following upbeat observation: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of... Read more
An alternative title for this essay might be “A Comedian Interprets the Parable of the Prodigal Son.” In the most recent “Faith for Normal People” podcast, “the other God-ordained podcast on the Internet” (Bible for Normal People is the first one), comedian Pete Holmes is the guest. I confess I had never heard of the guy and I’m not sure I’m headed to YouTube to find some of his standup. But he’s one of the few comedians I am aware... Read more
Last week I introduced a bunch of honors sophomores to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s distinction between “Cheap grace” and “Costly grace,” the difference between committing verbally to one’s faith while allowing it to affect one’s life only on the surface level (cheap), and embracing the life-changing and completely disruptive things that will happen if one takes one’s faith seriously (costly). I likened the distinction to the difference between light beer and real beer. Light beer smells like and looks like beer, but... Read more
The Gospel reading for last Sunday, the First Sunday of Lent, is the account of Jesus’ forty days of temptation in the wilderness from one of the synoptic Gospels. The account du jour was from Mark’s gospel, which–as usual–was brief, to the point, and lacking in some detiails (such as the actual content of the three temptations). The story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness is also the centerpiece of one of the greatest passages in all of literature, Fyodor... Read more
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