Have you never felt like one of those pawns forgotten in a corner of the board, with the sounds of battle fading behind them? They try to stand straight but wonder if they still have a king to serve. Arturo Pérez-Reverte On tap this coming week in my team-taught “Faith and Doubt” colloquium is the Grand Inquisitor materials from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s brilliant final novel, The Brothers Karamazov. As I have been reviewing these materials last week, I was reminded of one... Read more
It’s Presidents’ Day weekend, which for college professors means–as do all Monday holidays in the middle of the semester–“catch up day.” It’s the Spring semester’s version of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. I will be spending most of the day catching up on the grading that never seems to end, particularly since I have this nasty habit of assigning my students a lot of writing assignments. But it’s also a time to think about Presidents as well as social policy and politics.... Read more
All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change When Jeanne and I learned via early morning email a couple of Sundays ago that our good friend Mitch, the priest-in-charge for the past seven years at Trinity Episcopal Church where we attend, would be leaving Trinity at the end of the month to take a new assignment at another parish, we were not happy. Mitch announced that he... Read more
We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others. Michel de Montaigne, Essais I regularly tell my students that after more than thirty years of studying and teaching philosophy, I am convinced that the most interesting philosophical subject is a close to home as possible. The most fascinating philosophical topic is us. As the... Read more
What makes a human being beautiful? What is it that we love when we love someone? These are appropriate questions for Valentine’s Day, questions that Marilynne Robinson explores in her 2020 novel Jack through a very unlikely romance. Both Jack and Della are preacher’s kids, but there the similarity ends. Jack is a classic “black sheep of the family,” with years of wandering and vagrancy, as well as a few years in prison, in his past. Della is a grade... Read more
Today’s gospel reading is Luke’s abbreviated version of the Beatitudes. 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 builds up to the Sermon on the Mount, a... Read more
I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace. Baruch Spinoza My teaching colleagues and I were happy to hear a few days ago that Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus was recently banned by Tennessee’s McMinn County school board from its curriculum. Serialized from 1980-91, Maus won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for literature. When choosing the texts last fall for our team-taught course this semester, an interdisciplinary exploration of the twentieth century through literature,... Read more
Somewhere not long ago I heard or read that one of the top television programs in Finland (or Sweden or Norway) is a few hours of watching a fire burn in a fireplace. I don’t know whether or not this is true—I would hope that my Scandinavian cousins might go for a real fire in a fireplace rather than one on a screen. But Google “fireplace youtube video” and you will find several dozen to choose from. During the two-hour... Read more
In Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gilead, Reverend John Ames (one of my top five favorite characters in all of fiction) frequently expresses doubt concerning his faith, something unexpected in a Congregational minister, at least in some circles. In the middle of the novel, Ames spends a few pages considering doubt and uncertainty in one’s faith within the context of challenges from non-believers to “prove” that God exists. Concerning such challenges, Ames reflects that I must have told them... Read more
I am not overstating the case when I say that I was raised on original sin. I wrote about this in a post a few days ago, but it is worth mentioning again, simply because I feel now, close to the end of my 65th year, that the grip of this pernicious doctrine has largely lost its power over me. There are many reasons for this positive development, not the least being that I have learned the power of unconditional... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In