Back from the Rectory

Thank you all for your thoughtful comments, and, of course, my greatest thanks are reserved for Deacon Michael who generously spent two hours chatting with me yesterday.  I really appreciated both his candor and his enthusiasm.  It’s always so encouraging to see people who are energized by disagreement and conversation, rather than frightened of it.

I’m not going to do a beat by beat recap of our discussion for a variety of reasons.  The primary one is that I have a policy of only attributing ideas to specific people on this blog if that person has published them.  Thus ideas expressed in books, blogs, articles, or comments will be attributed, but I only refer to concepts I hear in conversation as ideas I heard about from ‘a friend’ or ‘a priest’ etc.  I don’t want people to need to censor themselves in conversation with me, and, even if they don’t mind, I prefer that my interpretation of what they said become gospel according to Google.

That said, I quite enjoyed the conversation and have a number of ideas I’d like to hash out here.  I think, ideally, after this week, I’ll take a break from the normal, themed post schedule here and do a series of longer, linked posts on one of the following topics.  Are there strong preferences as to which would come first?

Objective Morality and Mathematics
–How to live with imperfect access to transcendental concepts
–Morality, Beauty, and culturally contingent topics

Original Sin and the Fall
–What I mean when I say Sin
–Being Fallen without having fallen from

Reverse Engineering God
–Is the Christian theory of God coherent?
–What kind of God is implied to exist by his presumed instructions to us?