WTF Is This??–A story about change

Last updated on: September 20, 2020 at 12:12 pm By Vance Morgan

Organized religion often is a source of packaged answers and comfortable solutions to important questions about God and ourselves. Today’s lectionary reading from the Jewish scriptures is one of my favorites.. It suggests that eventually such answers and solutions must be left behind. In Exodus, the Israelites (who were miraculously delivered from the pursuing Egyptian armies by the parting of the Red Sea a few chapters earlier), are complaining. And with good reason, because they are hungry in the middle... Read more

The Dangers of Cognitive Immorality

Last updated on: September 17, 2020 at 6:10 am By Vance Morgan

An item popped up on my Facebook news feed not long ago reporting that Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird had recently been pulled from a junior-high reading list in a Mississippi school district. Lee’s novel has raised controversy ever since its publication for racist language and dated racial stereotypes, but in this case the explanation for banning the book was straightforward. The school board president reported simply that the book “makes people uncomfortable.” As a teacher who regularly has... Read more

The Fat, Relentless Ego . . . and what to do about it

Last updated on: September 14, 2020 at 8:51 pm By Vance Morgan

This past weekend, Jeanne and I, along with our two sons and our daughter-in-law, travelled from Providence to Long Island for the wedding of one of Jeanne’s nieces. It was the first time the five of us had been together since last Christmas, and the first time we had all been together in Providence in over two years. Jeanne is the youngest of five; the wedding offered the rare opportunity for all five of the siblings to be together in... Read more

There is No Substitute for the Real Thing

Last updated on: September 9, 2020 at 5:07 pm By Vance Morgan

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to return to one of my two favorite texts in the Hebrew scriptures—the Book of Job—with a dozen bright Honors students (the Book of Ruth is my other favorite). Job is a literary masterpiece, an exquisite and powerful dramatic treatment of the problem of innocent suffering and the larger problem of evil. I was pleased and encouraged to see that my seminar students found Job just as fascinating, confusing, and challenging as I... Read more

Silence: The Best Answer to Prayer

Last updated on: September 9, 2020 at 5:06 pm By Vance Morgan

I, as many people of faith, have often wondered why the divine is so apparently unavailable, so frequently silent. I, as many people of faith, have often assumed that this silence is my fault—especially since various people in my life since my youth have claimed that God speaks to them on a regular basis. The divine, in my experience, has always been elusive, showing itself just often enough in oblique and enigmatic ways to verify that the quarry I am... Read more

Living On the Edges of the Christian Circus Tent

Last updated on: September 6, 2020 at 12:24 pm By Vance Morgan

Jeanne and I celebrated our 32nd anniversary in July—the gifts we gave each other are reflective of a relationship that that has stood the test of time and in which the partners know each other very well. My gift from Jeanne was a power washer. It came at a perfect time, because we had just dropped a large amount of money on a new roof for the house a week or so earlier. There was nothing the house needed more... Read more

What it Truly Means to be Free

Last updated on: September 5, 2020 at 9:12 pm By Vance Morgan

Iris Murdoch is one of my favorite philosophers and novelists, but I seldom get to use her work in my teaching. Murdoch claimed to be an atheist, but she also believed that true moral commitment requires belief in something greater than ourselves, something transcendent not subject to the vagaries and whims of human existence. In the midst of exploring these matters in her philosophical essays and her novels, she crafted several memorable definitions of basic moral concepts. I wrote about... Read more

Love is the Discovery of Reality: A Story About Learning to See Things Differently

Last updated on: September 2, 2020 at 1:01 pm By Vance Morgan

Iris Murdoch was one of the philosophers whose work was front and center in my upper division course in contemporary philosophy a couple of semesters ago; last year was the centennial of her birth. She is a fascinating figure, an internationally respected philosopher who, at the height of her academic career, left academia to write novels full time. She ended up writing twenty-six of them, extraordinary investigations of the complexities and messiness of human relationships and commitments. Murdoch claimed to... Read more

How to Sound Knowledgeable About Things that You Know Nothing About

Last updated on: August 30, 2020 at 10:09 pm By Vance Morgan

In 1980, famed science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote the following in an opinion piece for Newsweek: There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. Here we are, forty years after Asimov’s opinion piece, and his observation... Read more

So You Want to be a Blogger? Here are some things I’ve learned over the past nine years.

Last updated on: August 27, 2020 at 7:58 pm By Vance Morgan

Nine years ago today, I started this blog. The last three and a half of those years have been here on Patheos. During a sabbatical eleven years ago, I began writing in a personal, non-academic essay style that was a sharp break from the academic writing that I had been doing (because I had to) for twenty years. I liked writing in this new way, found it both therapeutic (in a spiritual practice sort of way) and stimulating, but had... Read more