One of the things I have been wrestling with, given the recent loss of two loved ones, is God’s attitude toward death—and therefore what my own should be.
Read MorePlanning a funeral or memorial service is a values-clarification exercise–“What was important to him?” It’s also a guessing game of sorts—“What would she want?”
Read MoreThe room is maybe five feet by ten feet, an enclosed porch actually. It was Pamela’s inner sanctum (for better and worse). It’s where she went to think and search and smoke and read and think some more and smoke some more.
Read MoreWe thought we had entered a season of grief and suffering with Jamie’s death in the avalanche. Now, with the death a few weeks later of his mother Pamela—largely from grief I myself believe—we find this season turning into a long winter.
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My 38 year-old nephew, Jamie Pierre, died this week in a tragic ski accident in Utah.
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A darkness came over the extended family last night with the news that Jamie Pierre—father, husband, son, brother, nephew, cousin, friend—was killed in an avalanche in Utah (Sunday, Nov. 13).
Read MoreHave you noticed that when you learn a new word, you start noticing it everywhere? Same when you write a book.
Read MoreSkeptics are used to being accused of being too skeptical, even cynical. Many actually hear the charge with a touch of satisfaction (“No one’s going to pull the wool over my eyes!”). But in my view we skeptics are often not skeptical enough.
Read MoreI’ve decided I need to lighten up a bit with these posts. Too many heavy topics—hell, doubt, skepticism, Bonhoeffer. So how about a bit on Bob Dylan’s twenty minutes as a Christian?
Read MoreI once read that when Karl Barth taught, he would write all morning and then read to a class in the afternoon what he had written. I no longer have a class to read to, so I will share with you what I just finished writing.
Read MoreI have been arguing in the last two posts that human beings are inescapably meaning-makers, constantly engaged in trying to make sense of the world—and that pure reason is only one, often tangential, component in the process.
Read MoreThe messiness of sense-making has certain implications for any thought-filled person, including the skeptical believer.
Read MoreWe have more words for thinking than Eskimos have for snow—and they have dozens. All of them are attempts to get at some aspect of the ceaseless human process of making sense of things.
Read MoreI just completed an interview a few minutes ago for a documentary being produced on the recent controversy about views of hell (Hellbound), prompted by Rob Bell’s book Love Wins and the range of reactions to it.
Read MoreReason is both a lovely helpmate and a whore. I have been exploring that idea quite a bit the last few months while writing this Skeptical Believer book.
Read MoreConsistent readers of this still new blog (that would be me and a certain redhead), will have noticed how often I center a post on a quotation, most often from a book I am reading at the time.
Read MoreCzeslaw Milosz, the Christian Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner, called the poet “the secretary of invisible things.” Unlike Romantic theories of creation, he said the poet did not create things so much as discover things. The poet is a prober of reality, not its maker. And many of the most important things cannot be seen or touched.
Read MoreIn 1956, JRR Tolkien wrote in a letter, “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a “long defeat”—though it contains . . . some samples or glimpses of final victory.” I find myself resonating with that view, though I am not entirely sure whether it is because of my temperament, my theology, or my experience of the world.
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