In the wee hours of this morning, the time changed from Daylight Saving Time to standard time. Are you okay? Still sane? Or has this annual event thrown your circadian rhythm out of whack out of whack so badly that you may never recover? I’m going out on a limb here—way out. I like time changes. This year Daylight Savings time began on March 14, shifting the clock to provide an extra hour of light in the evening and ended... Read more
November is a month of transitions. Here in New England, we are squarely in the middle of autumn. To the north where I grew up, the leaves have turned and are already falling; in southern New England where I now live, the leaves are at their most colorful; some of them are already dropping. The predicted high for each of the next ten days is in the fifties, and we will be getting our first freeze of the season soon.... Read more
As is the case with many of the things in my life, my knowledge of social media is both narrow and deep. I am active only on two social media platforms, but on those limited platforms I am very active. Any time I have wondered about something other than Facebook and Twitter, I ask my oldest son who, because of his work, is active across numerous social media platforms, whether I should try it out. He always tells me to... Read more
It’s Halloween. I regularly post around this time of the year about how Halloween is my least favorite holiday (slightly ahead of the Fourth of July) for any number of reasons. But this year, in keeping with related themes I’ve been writing about recently, Halloween gives me another reason 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... Read more
One of my favorite features of liturgical worship is encountering familiar and favorite texts during the lectionary cycle. One recent Sunday, for instance, I read as lector from Proverbs, a selection that included the verses that I used to dedicate my first published book to my mother: “She opens her mouth with wisdom . . . her children rise up and call her blessed.” Another recently assigned text was Psalm 127, which includes the passage I used when dedicating my... Read more
In my ethics classes this week, we will be discussing a recent 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... Read more
In my ethics classes, we are currently in the middle of a unit called “Does ethics have anything to do with God?” Since many of my students on the Catholic college campus where I teach are products of twelve years of Catholic parochial school education, this is a question that they have never encountered, let alone addressed seriously. I take delight in introducing them to the possibility that a serious commitment to the moral life need have nothing to do... Read more
I am in the middle of reading fifty 4-6 page papers from the students in my two sections of General Ethics. It’s a slog because there are so many of them, but they are engaging with some seminal questions about the moral life and about our commitments to actually acting on what we claim to believe. What would happen if we actually took the things we claim to believe seriously enough to do something about them? Seriously enough to completely... Read more
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
When discussing which Biblical text or texts we should include in our new “Faith and Doubt” colloquium that debuts next semester, my teaching partner and I immediately agreed that it had to be the Book of Job. Scholars tell us that it is the oldest text in the Jewish scriptures; it is also a classic tale of one person’s persistent and stubborn faith in the midst of doubt. Portions from Job have been the first lectionary reading each of the... Read more
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