You decide to pick up that coffee cup and take a sip. Was that decision really free, or was it the determined outcome of unconscious brain activity that led to your picking up that cup and sipping the good, dark stuff? Or, the crime you committed (or were about to commit: See Minority Report) was determined by something other than your conscious, willful choice, are you really responsible for it? Some scientists (and philosophers) say that the feeling of having... Read more
I’m struck by the brevity of life today, as I wriggle today between two life-bookends. Today is my daughter’s last day of kindergarten. Her life is stretched out in front of her like big, open canvass. And yet, it’s already slipping by too fast. Yesterday I told her that, starting Saturday, she’d be a first-grader! She corrected me: “No, Dad,” she said. She has a whole summer to be “in-between” kindergarten and first-grade. In other words, don’t rush it, Dad.... Read more
It’s conceivable that God couldn’t have possibly created a world that has free, moral agents in it who do not also misuse their freedom. That’s that gist of Alvin Plantinga’s version of the “free-will defense” for why God could be both good and powerful, and yet evil exits. I came across a good summary description of Plantinga’s argument, which has at the heart of it that intriguing phrase, “transworld depravity,” in an article by Matthew Lundberg. Here’s the gist: Plantinga... Read more
In 1518, at a meeting of the Augustinian Order in Heidelberg, Germany, a monk named Leonhard Beier had the task of defending a series of assertions which Luther had written. Luther himself presided over the meeting. These assertions were a kind of explanatory follow-up to the 95 theses. The controversy over the Disputation resulted in the famous “Leipzig debate” that next year between Catholic apologist, Johann Eck, on the one side and Andreas Karlstadt and Luther on the other. In... Read more
Sometimes it feels like the carefree days of youth have slipped too far behind me. Adulthood has wrapped over me like a too-heavy, scratchy blanket. I was given new words for that feeling recently, thanks to the wisdom and wit of Ernest Becker’s The Birth and Death of Meaning: Only during one period in our lives do we normally break down the barriers of separateness, and that is during the time that the psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan called the “preadolescent... Read more
I just picked up Peter Brown’s The Body and Society, which is a fascinating study of sex and the body in early Christianity. I first encountered Brown many years ago, through his biography of Augustine. In the introduction to the most recent, 20th anniversary edition, Brown offers up an insight about the role of sex for people of antiquity, including early Christians, in relation to the vexing problem of death and to anxiety about mortality: Ultimately, sex was not the expression of... Read more
You can’t really understand the dynamics of American religion–and even of American politics and the myriad culture wars–today without having an understanding of “evangelicalism.” It’s long been a contested term. It certainly is now. Nearly 25% of Americans self-identity as evangelical Protestant. That’s a big slice of the American religious pie. But I’d bet a significant number of those 25% aren’t even quite sure what they’re identifying with. And who can blame them? The term is notoriously fluid, often ambiguous,... Read more
What does the Trinity have to do with feminism? It’s Trinity Sunday, so I’ll share a couple quotes with you from my favorite book on the Trinity, Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life It is not surprising that in the initial stages of theological feminism the subject of the Trinity was either rejected outright or simply ignored. Now some feminist theologians appeal explicitly to Trinitarian theology in support of a relational view of human personhood... Read more
If you accept the theory of evolution (and you should) then you also must accept the brutal truth that over 98% of all animal species in the 4 billion-year long history of life are now extinct. Peter Paul Rubens, via WikiCommons, Public Domain (cropped) That’s a lot of death. A lot of evolutionary waste. A lot of suffering, too. How many of those animals perished while experiencing pain? How many died young? Predator and prey. Nature red in tooth and... Read more
I came across a very helpful summary of “theological feminism” today, in Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s God For Us: The Trinity and the Christian Life. So I share it with you: Theological feminism is the critique of the androcentric [male-centered] bias of theology in which God is imaged and conceptualized as male, male experience is assumed to be normative for human experience, women are identified with the carnal and irrational, and are assumed to be responsible for the entry of sin... Read more
Unsystematic Theology
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