It hardly seems possible that I am now in the tenth calendar year of writing this blog (my first post was at the end of August 2012). It seems even less possible that it was fifteen years ago that I first began experimenting with writing short essays, the type of writing that eventually produced and continues to sustain this blog, as well as two books that have grown out of such essays. I applied to the 2007 Southampton Writers’ Conference... Read more
The first text in the new “Faith and Doubt” colloquium that I am team-teaching this semester was Anne Lamott’s Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. Plan B is a sequel to Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith; I remember clearly when, a number of years ago, I picked up Traveling Mercies from a table of new paperbacks in Borders (back when Borders still existed). I’m always drawn to any book outside the Religion, Theology, Spirituality, or New Age section of... Read more
This past week I began a new course with a colleague from the Political Science department who is also a Dominican priest. We began our “Faith and Doubt” colloquium 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 that “the opposite of faith is not doubt,... Read more
Roughly a month after the 1/6 insurrection last year, at a House of Representatives event organized by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to provide members of Congress to share their experiences of the January 6th mob occupation of the Capitol, Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) closed his comments as follows: I close with an invitation – a hopeful invitation – to everyone watching or listening, whether you experienced January 6th in this room, whether you were barricaded in an office across the... Read more
In a perfect world, I would never give a written final exam in any class that I am involved with. Since I frequently team-teach with colleagues who do not share my vision of a perfect academic world, many courses I am involved with have traditional final written exams. But in my own classes, at least those past the introductory level, final exams are oral. As I often tell my colleagues who are skeptical of the value of oral exams, I... Read more
Former President Obama loved to quote a hopeful statement from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The quote was so important to the former President that he had it woven into a rug in the Oval Office. The statement is controversial, because it can be used to justify all sorts of ideas (since there are many conceptions of what “justice” amounts to), as well as a justification for... Read more
Miracles come in all shapes and sizes, both unmistakable and inexplicable. Anne Lamott writes that “Grace means you’re in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.” That’s a miracle. Faith is committing yourself to seeing how that miracle plays out. Read more
At the beginning of a recent episode of “Consider This,” NPR’s daily afternoon news podcast, Rev. Jim Wallis, the chair of the Faith and Justice Center at Georgetown University, commented on the fact that many of those who participated in the January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection began their activities with a prayer thanking God for “gracing us with this opportunity to stand up for our God-given unalienable rights.” While part of the motivation for the insurrectionists that day was the... Read more
I, as well as the rest of the world, was saddened to hear of the death of Archbishop Desmond Tutu on the day after Christmas. Tutu, who won the Nobel Prize in 1984, was a powerful voice for change in South Africas anti-apartheid movement; he used his pulpit and spirited oratory to help bring down apartheid in South Africa and then became the leading advocate of peaceful reconciliation under Black majority rule. I particularly appreciated Tutu’s theology, which was both... Read more
Among the many striking images that we have all seen in the year that has passed since the January 6th insurrection are numerous Christian symbols (crosses, flags, signs, banners) interspersed with all manner of conservative political and social symbols carried and worn by people bent on violence, chaos, and mayhem. A few days after the the insurrection, the New York Times published an article by Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham entitled “How White Evangelical Christians Fused With Trump Extremism.” Here’s... Read more
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