There may be no need to reconcile all one’s beliefs with all one’s other beliefs—no need to attempt to see reality steadily and as a whole. Perhaps our beliefs can be compartmentalized, so that there is no need, for example, to reconcile one’s regular attendance at Mass with one’s work as an evolutionary biologist. Richard Rorty This passage was part of the final essay that my American Philosophy students and I considered in our final class of the semester yesterday.... Read more
Doubt is Next to Godliness Last Friday’s post imagined a conversation between Karl Marx and Jesus in which they discuss a passage or two from Richard Rorty’s essay “Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hope,” an essay that just happened to be the focus of class discussion in my American Philosophy class last week. Why “Christian Socialism” is not an oxymoron One of Rorty’s many interesting and controversial claims in that essay is that “We should read [The Communist Manifesto and the... Read more
We should read the New Testament as saying that how we treat each other on earth matters a great deal more than the outcome of debate concerning the existence or nature of another world. Richard Rorty, “Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes” One of the final texts we will be studying in my American Philosophy course that finishes next week is by Richard Rorty, an influential American pragmatist philosopher from the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century. In his essay “Failed Prophecies,... Read more
I was, as were billions of other people, saddened to hear the news of Pope Francis I’s passing yesterday. As a non-Catholic who has taught in Catholic higher education for thirty-five years and who has dozens of Catholic colleagues and friends, I’ve always paid closeattention to this Argentinian Jesuit who seemed to be very different from the string of popes since John XXIII who was pope when I was born. According to the search engine on my blog platform, Francis... Read more
Easter is the celebration of the promise of hope, the promise of new life, that surely after darkness there is light, and that within the deepest betrayals lie the possibilities of forgiveness. Yet as Barbara Johnson writes, “[W]e are Easter people living in a Good Friday world,” a world that provides more Good Friday moments on a daily basis. Eventually the joy of Easter and what follows in its wake fades. What then? The lectionary texts for Easter Sunday and... Read more
Holy Saturday reminds us that we are mortal and that we all will die. Quoting the Book of Job, the Holy Saturday liturgy reminds us that [m]ortals die, and are laid low . . . As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, so mortals lie down and do not rise again; until the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused out of their sleep. Those who loved and followed... Read more
The gospel reading for the Good Friday liturgy from John’s gospel begins with Jesus’s arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane and ends with Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus preparing Jesus’s body for burial and placing it in a tomb. Many Christmas Eves ago, Jeanne, our youngest son Justin, and I were invited to share dinner with a friend from work and her family, which included two precocious and very active children. On display was a beautiful crèche that contained all... Read more
The drama from Thursday into early Friday of Holy Week is both familiar and inescapable. The Last Supper. The Garden of Gethsemane. Judas’s betrayal. Peter’s denial. All inexorably leading to trial, conviction, and crucifixion. The elements of the story are so familiar to Christians and others that it is tempting to suppose that there are no more fresh takes or new perspectives to consider on this important but well-worn story. The lectionary Maundy Thursday gospel continues with John’s account of... Read more
The appointed gospel for Wednesday of Holy Week takes us to a dramatic scene in the middle of Jesus’s last meal with his disciples before his arrest (the early portions of the last supper narrative are the beginning of the gospel text for Maundy Thursday). The reading begins with Jesus observing that “one of you will betray me” and, a few verses later, ends with Jesus telling Simon Peter that “before the cock crows, you will have denied me three... Read more
In all three of the synoptic gospels, the first thing that Jesus does early in Holy Week is drive the buyers, sellers, and moneychangers out of the Temple, overturning their tables and causing a general ruckus. Both Matthew and Mark also report that on one of the early days of Holy Week Jesus cursed a fig tree because it had all leaves and no figs, even though it was not the right season for figs; the tree subsequently withered and... Read more
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