I want to expand a bit on a metaphor I came across a while back in reading Barbara Hagerty’s Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality. She talked to a lot of brain scientists, including many who believe that God and things of the spirit are entirely a creation of the human brain.
Read MoreOne of the real advantages of not professionally professing literature any longer is expanding my range of reading. I have decided to get just educated enough about brain research to be dangerous, hence my latest Amazon order.
Read MoreI’m reading Alister McGrath’s new critical biography of C.S. Lewis. I was not sure that we needed another bio of Lewis, but am finding it useful and insightful because he engages Lewis’s writing more fully than the other bios.
Read MoreI think of good books as time bombs. They sit there in the stack ticking away, waiting patiently for you to pick them up so they can explode in your mind.
Read MoreI gave a talk yesterday, at the invitation of the Bethel University art and English departments, on Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping. I called her, for me, a “wow” writer, meaning that I find myself frequently pausing after reading a passage and saying, sometimes out loud, “wow.”
Read MoreI am happy to announce that the book I have been using as an excuse for not doing any profitable work the last few years is now available. The Skeptical Believer: Telling Stories to Your Inner Atheist is available.
Read MoreIn the season of Wise Men, I’d like to say a word in praise of Charles Schultz, philosopher-theologian-cartoonist and wise man. In one of the Peanuts cartoons, Linus is sitting in the pumpkin patch with Snoopy, the place Linus does his best thinking (and hoping). He asks Snoopy a question…
Read MoreWe are always coming in on something that is already going on.
Read MoreJust finished reading Andrea Palpant Dilley’s Faith and Other Flat Tires (Zondervan) and found a lot to like and ruminate on. One point she makes that I find interesting is that, for her, the fact of suffering seems more an argument for the existence of God than an argument against God.
Read MoreThis post is a solemn one—in the old meaning of that word: something both deeply significant and joyful (as in a solemn occasion, like a wedding or a coronation). In this case the solemn occasion was a burial, and is was both deeply significant and joyful.
Read More“I discover the holy . . . [by] peering under the edges of the ordinary.”
Read MoreIn a copy of The Great Divorce that C.S. Lewis gave to Joy Davidman a couple of years before their marriage, Lewis wrote the following: “There are three images in my mind which I must continually forsake and replace by better ones: the false image of God, the false image of my neighbours, and the false image of myself.”
Read MoreOne of the most common questions for (and among) Christians, members of a supposedly “exclusive” religion (which I think is bunk), is “What about those who never hear of Jesus?”
Read MoreI have in recent months been surrounded by people who have good reason to want to know what is going to happen to them and to those they care about—involving health, life and death, jobs, relationships, eternal fate, and so on.
Read MoreI have just returned from three weeks in California, mostly in my hometown of Santa Barbara. Among the good conversations with friends old and new was one that reminded me of the challenge of bridging the gap with people who live in widely divergent understandings of life.
Read MoreI am in my home town–Santa Barbara, California–these last three weeks of January. Trying to write, sometimes with a warm sun on my back.
Read MoreReflecting on the rapidity with which your whole life can collapse (in the context of living in Stalinist Russia where you could be an average citizen one day and in the concentration camps the next), Solzhenitsyn says the following: “The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: ‘You are under arrest.'”
Read MoreMy brother-in-law, who has just lost his son and wife, was talking about how difficult it is to care these days about many everyday things, including his work. Yes, after great loss most things seem trivial.
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