It’s Hard to Talk About God

Last updated on: May 16, 2023 at 11:53 am By Vance Morgan

In our recently completed “Faith and Doubt” colloquium, my Dominican priest colleague and I filled the syllabus with authors who have shaped our own perspectives on and continuing lives of faith. I have written about mine many times over the decade of this blog’s existence; Anne Lamott, Michel de Montaigne, Simone Weil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Iris Murdoch, and Rachel Held Evans all made important appearances during the semester. My colleague’s influences included several who also are on my list, including Soren... Read more

What Freedom Amounts To

Last updated on: May 15, 2023 at 7:02 pm By Vance Morgan

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Each of us can point to a time (or several times) in our past when we made a decision that, in retrospect, significantly shaped our lives going forward. Such decisions for me include getting married at one month past twenty, choosing to leave law school for a masters program in philosophy, and deciding to commit for life in my early thirties to a person whom I had known for six weeks. I could have chosen differently in each of these... Read more

She Opens Her Mouth With Wisdom . . . Her Childen Rise Up and Call Her Blessed

Last updated on: May 10, 2023 at 8:19 am By Vance Morgan

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Because of the quirks of the calendar, the anniversary of my father’s death and Mother’s Day often occur within a few days of each other. Last Thursday I wrote about my Dad; today it’s Mom’s turn. Although I would have denied it vociferously as a boy or adolescent, I was a classic momma’s boy. My older brother loved my mother but was all about Dad, while my attachments were the exact opposite. My brother and I were a twentieth-century version... Read more

I am Not Your Friend. I am Your Professor.

Last updated on: May 12, 2023 at 10:27 am By Vance Morgan

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The semester ended a week ago and I just turned my final grades in,. I have a sabbatical semester in the fall; I won’t be back in the a classroom until the middle of January 2024. But I’m still thinking about the classroom and my students. Truth be told, hardly a day goes by, even during winter and summer breaks, that I don’t think about the classroom and my students. This will particularly be the case over the next few... Read more

What I Learned From My Father

Last updated on: May 10, 2023 at 1:04 pm By Vance Morgan

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One of the most important things an author has to write when a book is in its late stages is the dedication. I have dedicated books to my mother, my sons, and to Jeanne, but my most recent book–Prayer for People Who Don’t Believe in God (Wood Lake, 2019)–is dedicated to my father. It makes sense, because in many ways this is my most controversial book so far, pushing the envelope of traditional thinking, belief, and practice concerning prayer as... Read more

Determined to Believe that We are Not Determined

Last updated on: May 8, 2023 at 1:38 pm By Vance Morgan

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In a recent edition of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik reviews two or three books about the English Revolution that occurred during the middle of the 17th century (Charles I losing his head, the meteoric rise and fall of Oliver Cromwell, and so on). Gopnik, always an excellent wordsmith, waxes philosophical toward the end of the essay as he reflects on what we learn about human nature by studying such events. The baseline anxiety of human beings so often turns... Read more

Getting Stoned for Jesus

Last updated on: April 25, 2023 at 8:15 pm By Vance Morgan

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The New Testament reading in today’s lectionary line-up is the stoning of Stephen from the Book of Acts. This reminds me of a brief conversation I had with a Benedictine monk a decade ago. “Happy Stoning Day!” Brother John said as he greeted me after noon prayer the day after Christmas. December 26 is the Feast of St. Stephen, officially designated as the first Christian martyr. Brother John, a guitar-picking, out-of-the-box product of the sixties, is not your typical Benedictine. “I’ve... Read more

Various Ways of Saying “Hello” to God

Last updated on: May 2, 2023 at 1:36 pm By Vance Morgan

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You can either think of the creeds of the great traditions . . . as telling you what you ought to think. Or you can say they are in some sense comparable to the theories of science. Lindon Eaves In The Night of the Confessor, Czech Catholic priest (and philosopher/ theologian/ psychologist) Tomáš Halík mentions a friend who is “a physicist, a Catholic, and a nice man” who occasionally meetings of the clergy and gives talks about contemporary developments in physics.... Read more

The Most Profoundly Religious Statement of All

Last updated on: April 29, 2023 at 11:16 am By Vance Morgan

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In last Thursday’s meeting of the “Faith and Doubt” seminar I team-teach with a Dominican priest friend and colleague, the text for the day was the last two-thirds of Rachel Held Evans’ last book, Wholehearted Faith. Evans was the latest in a string of authors, including Michel de Montaigne, Anne Lamott, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and Tomas Halik that we had considered throughout the semester. As I have written on the blog in... Read more

A Bunch of Communists in the Book of Acts

Last updated on: April 29, 2023 at 10:32 am By Vance Morgan

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I have been accused frequently over the years by commenters on my blog and on Facebook of promoting an understanding of Christianity that is significantly different than “traditional and historical” Christianity. I’m not sure what these critics thought they were going to find on a blog called “Freelance Christianity” the they found on Patheos’ “Progressive Christian” channel, but there you go. I’m somewhat amused by the “traditional and historical Christianty” trope, because that almost always means “what conforms to my... Read more