Warthogs and Saints: Who Gets to be at the Front of the Line?

Last updated on: November 3, 2022 at 12:09 pm By Vance Morgan

One of my colleagues and friends and I are beginning to construct the syllabus for a colloquium we will be teaching next semester. We taught it successfully last spring but are up for a few tweaks the second time around. We closed last spring’s colloquium with Wholehearted Faith, Rachel Held Evans’ final book published after her untimely and tragic death in 2019. Evans’ work resonates with me because her story is somewhat similar to mine, an emergence from Protestant fundamentalism toward... Read more

Betting on God’s Existence

Last updated on: November 1, 2022 at 10:44 am By Vance Morgan

In my ethics class this week, we discussed an essay by Gary Gutting, who teaches at the University of Notre Dame, that engages with one of the most famous arguments for the existence of God ever offered: Blaise Pascal’s “Wager.” Except that the “Wager” is not an argument for the existence of God at all. Rather, it is Pascal’s analysis of an interesting situation that human beings find themselves in. Since we cannot prove beyond the shadow of a doubt... Read more

Do You Believe in Halloween Jesus?

Last updated on: October 31, 2022 at 8:52 am By Vance Morgan

It’s Halloween. Halloween gives me the opportunity to consider my long and checkered past with the Christian faith, as well as why I stay within the Christian tent in spite of what appear to be good reasons to leave. One Sunday, toward the end of a particularly lively and deep seminar with my “Living Stones” adult Christian education group after the morning service, I asked the group “so what makes us think that we are anything special, that Episcopalians have... Read more

How to Make Certain Christians Very Angry

Last updated on: October 30, 2022 at 7:53 am By Vance Morgan

In the ten-plus years of this blog’s existence, I have made any number of Christians angry. Sometimes accidentally, often deliberately. But there is nothing more certain to piss off certain types of Christians than suggesting that the gospel of Jesus and the gospel of Karl Marx have a lot in common. During the middle of a semester my essays on this site are often directly connected with what is going on in my various classrooms. Over the past ten days... Read more

Of Halloween, Baptists, and Socialism

Last updated on: October 27, 2022 at 7:04 am By Vance Morgan

Halloween is coming–one of my least favorite holidays of the year. I know that offends many people, but so be it. Still, the onset of Halloween brings back memories–many of them religion and church related. Maybe that’s why I don’t like the holiday! As a 66-year-old guy with no small children in my life, I don’t do Halloween. In the past Jeanne and I have celebrated the day by going to a late afternoon movie, followed by dinner, so we... Read more

Karl Marx and Jesus Walk into a Bar . . .

Last updated on: October 23, 2022 at 1:41 pm By Vance Morgan

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 many things I enjoy about teaching philosophy is that I regularly get to engage with students in studying the texts of thinkers labelled as “dangerous” or worse by various authority figures in my youth. Darwin . .... Read more

What is Prayer Supposed to Accomplish?

Last updated on: October 22, 2022 at 8:35 am By Vance Morgan

Today’s gospel lectionary reading reminds me of an August day several years ago when the small Episcopal church that I frequently attend moved its morning services out of the sanctuary out “into all the world” on a beautiful summer morning, heading a half mile down the road to a town park on Narragansett Bay. A small table in the gazebo served as the altar, as twenty-five or so 8:00 service regulars enjoyed a modest version of taking the gospel into... Read more

The Best Answer for Unanswerable Questions: “I Don’t Know”

Last updated on: October 18, 2022 at 3:53 pm By Vance Morgan

Natural disasters have been on my mind recently. Perhaps it’s because of the fury of Hurricane Ian a few weeks ago, devastating an area of Florida where my son and daughter-in-law lived for several years and where many of their friends lost everything in the storm. Perhaps it’s because a seminar on Enlightenment satire early in the semester got me to thinking about the devastating 1755 Lisbon earthquake described in Voltaire’s Candide. Perhaps it is because our seminar text in... Read more

How is your Optimism Doing These Days?

Last updated on: October 17, 2022 at 4:26 pm By Vance Morgan

A few weeks ago in the interdisciplinary Honors course that I am team-teaching in this semester, we are smack in the middle of the 18th century. And that, among other things, means satire. I love satire and frequently use it in class to great effect, an effect heightened by the fact that the average nineteen-year-old can’t tell the difference between satire, irony, and a spreadsheet (even when they are in the Honors program). The texts for our satire seminar included... Read more

Mapping Ghosts and Believing Things that Aren’t True

Last updated on: October 15, 2022 at 8:08 pm By Vance Morgan

Over the years that I have been writing this blog, those who describe themselves as non-believers or atheists have frequently expressed a consistent confusion and frustration. It usually goes something like this: “How can someone who seems to be relatively normal and intelligent believe in something without any evidence?” I don’t get defensive when asked this and similar questions—I don’t want to be that sort of Christian. I often reply by suggesting that there is evidence to support my faith,... Read more