Mentors from the Muppet Show

Last updated on: January 31, 2023 at 11:48 am By Vance Morgan

I have a recently retired good friend and colleague in the philosophy department who has twin daughters. A number of years ago, during the summer between his daughters’ junior and senior years in high school, my friend and his family visited seventeen different college campuses. The young ladies in question, although twins, could not be more different in appearance or personality. Daughter #1, whose interests were predominantly focused on science, favored Dartmouth College but was also very interested in the... Read more

An Epiphany Worthy of the Season

Last updated on: January 28, 2023 at 11:52 am By Vance Morgan

0 Comments

I have heard of you with my ears, but now my eyes have seen you. The Book of Job In the “Faith and Doubt” colloquium that I am team-teaching this semester, the first seminar text was the Book of Job from the Jewish scriptures. Among other things, we talked about Job’s reaction to what God has to say about the unfairness of Job’s suffering after many chapters of silence from the Divine end of things. Job, described by God to Satan... Read more

Deciding Whom You Belong To

Last updated on: January 25, 2023 at 2:06 pm By Vance Morgan

0 Comments

Five years ago, my college celebrated its centennial. For Jeanne and me, the highlight of a series of events scheduled to mark the anniversary was a lecture by Doris Kearns Goodwin. We arrived early enough to sit in the second row, twenty feet or so from the podium, and along with a packed house were held spellbound for over an hour as our favorite historian used examples from the lives of Presidents about whom she has written best sellers—LBJ, FDR,... Read more

We are to be God in the World

Last updated on: January 24, 2023 at 8:34 am By Vance Morgan

0 Comments

This coming Sunday’s gospel reading is the Beatitudes from Matthew, the opening lines from the Sermon on the Mount. It is a scene so familiar in our imaginations that it has become iconic. In films, on television, the subject of countless artistic renditions, we are transported back two thousand years. It is a beautiful, cloudless day. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people have gathered in the countryside from miles around; some have walked for hours. The second season of The Chosen... Read more

When the Well Runs Dry

Last updated on: January 20, 2023 at 6:48 pm By Vance Morgan

0 Comments

Therefore with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. Isaiah 12 In his collection of essays Breakfast at the Victory, James Carse writes about the spiritual lessons he learned when the water at his family’s rural New England cabin started tasting funny one summer. It turned out that the wooden cover over the cabin’s well had collapsed under the weight of a deer or a bear, and was polluting the water that fed the well. Carse’s essay explores, with some... Read more

Be Like a Tree

Last updated on: January 11, 2023 at 5:07 pm By Vance Morgan

0 Comments

There are two kinds of living things. They are distinguished by the strategies they have developed in response to perceived threat and danger. One kind responds to danger by running away from it, developing strategies and evolving tools to sidestep threats in more and more complex and sophisticated ways. We call this kind of living thing Animals. The other kind’s strategy is to hunker down, grow roots along with protective armor, and face danger by refusing to be moved. We... Read more

The Spirit of the Lord is Upon Me . . .

Last updated on: January 16, 2023 at 12:35 pm By Vance Morgan

0 Comments

Spring semester classes start today. One of my courses is a team-taught colloquium with a colleague from the Political Science department who is also a Dominican priest. We will begin our “Faith and Doubt” colloquium on Thursday with Anne Lamott’s Plan B as we are seeking from the start to provide our students with a less traditional, less mysterious, and more serviceable orientation to “faith,” one that will be developed and stretched to its limit over the semester. Lamott’s observation... Read more

Mansplaining in the Bible

Last updated on: January 11, 2023 at 4:30 pm By Vance Morgan

0 Comments

At a department meeting not long ago, our department chair wondered whether it might be good for the sake of building department chemistry to have various events in which we share teaching tricks of the trade with each other. “After all,” he said, “three of our faculty have won the Accinno award!” The Accinno award is my college’s “Teacher of the Year” award, which I won eighteen years ago in just the third year of its existence. I expressed my... Read more

What Compost Piles Teach Us About Faith

Last updated on: January 13, 2023 at 6:17 pm By Vance Morgan

0 Comments

Over the past year or so I have read several books by Peter Enns, a professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University in Pennsylvania. In his 2014 book The Bible Tells Me So . . .” and The Sin of Certainty published in 2016, Enns make the argument that interpreting the Bible should start with completely scrapping the idea that the Bible is a divinely inspired rule book for how to live a life pleasing to God, a rule book... Read more

Are You the One?

Last updated on: January 9, 2023 at 3:42 pm By Vance Morgan

0 Comments

During both the Advent and the Epiphany liturgical seasons, John the Baptist gets a lot of play. Last Sunday was “The Baptism of our Lord” Sunday which obviously involves Jesus’ cousin as an important character. Next Sunday’s gospel includes John’s identifying Jesus as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” after which John directs a couple of his disciples to leave his entourage and follow Jesus. Eventually, as we know, John runs afoul of Herod... Read more