I was in church for the first time in a month or so recently and noticed a couple of seemingly minor but very important changes that have been made in very familiar liturgical texts by the new priest-in-charge who has been in place for just a few months. For instance, the Lord’s Prayer: Praise God from whom all blessings flow, Praise Him God all creatures here below, Praise Him God above ye heavenly hosts, Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.... Read more
In a podcast I was listening to while walking Bovina a few days ago, a New Testament scholar and theology professor from somewhere said that there is no report in the gospels of Jesus ever encountering a dead person without raising her or him from the dead. The theologian speculated that this means that death is not a good thing (duh). If his claim about the gospel accounts is true (I haven’t fact-checked this yet), it could simply be that... Read more
“Redeem the time,” Paul says in his letter to the church at Philippi, “because the days are evil.” As a youngster I wondered why time needed redeeming and what it needed redeeming from—I still wonder that as a sixty-something. As a person for whom time seems to pass more quickly every day, let alone every year, it’s worth taking a look at the nature of time and why it might need to be saved or redeemed. It brings me back... Read more
In December of 1942, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a Christmas letter to a number of his friends, relatives, and colleagues—people with whom he had been involved for the previous decade in various escalating behind-the-scenes and increasingly dangerous attempts to undermine the rule of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. This letter has come to be known as “Ten Years After.” As his fellow conspirators waited to see if the latest of numerous attempts to assassinate the Fuhrer would finally be successful,... Read more
Most everyone is familiar with the opening lines of Genesis, where 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... Read more
Tomorrow is a big day for Providence College sports fans. Our men’s hockey team will unexpectedly be playing in their league’s semifinals against Boston University at 4:00, then our men’s basketball team will play in its first round NCAA tournament game against Kentucky at 7:00. Must see viewing. Oh, and tomorrow is also St. Patrick’s Day, to which I say: Meh. A few years ago, I had a brief locker room conversation with a campus security guard who frequently tortures... Read more
Starting thise week I am the up front person in both of my team-taught courses for the next two or three weeks. The texts will be from the three 20th century figures who have been most influential on me both professionally and personally: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch. One of the the things I most appreciate about the opportunity to focus on these thinkers in the same course is that it gives me the opportunity to trace connections... Read more
Man is in his actions and practices, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue The most recent edition of The New Yorker—the one with my birthday (March 6, 2023) and Ron DeSantis (ugh!) on the cover—includes a several-thousand-word essay titled “The End of the English Major,” followed by the subtitle “Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?” Although I’m glad I read it, it does... Read more
Albert Camus’ classic extended essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” begins as follows: 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 philosophy. This essay, along with Sartre’s play “No Exit,” was the assigned text in my Honors seminar last week. The conversation was excellent and memorable, addressing several of the matters that I’ll be exploring in this post. If you got... Read more
After spending six and a half decades in the middle of this faith thing, one would think that I might have made some definitive conclusions about faith and real life by now. After all, that’s what the decade of this blog’s existence has been about. But I am continually reminded that any attempts to “figure faith out,” by me or anyone else, are doomed to failure. “Doomed” not because faith can’t be figured out. “Doomed” because, as we philosophers might... Read more
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