Skeptics 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.
Read MoreThis post is actually a commercial, brought to you by our sponsor (namely, me). I will be conducting a six week (one evening a week) workshop on creating a spiritual legacy for those in the Twin Cities area from Nov. 1 until December 6, 2011. Consider yourself invited if you live in the area.
Read MoreIn the 18th century there was an ongoing debate referred to as “The Ancients-Moderns controversy,” in which one side argued that the present was clearly inferior to the past, especially in terms of art, virtue, and the state of civilization in general. The other side trumpeted the superiority of the present and future over the relatively ignorant past. That debate is still going on.
Read MoreYou don’t have to worry about hurting God’s feelings—at least not with your questions and doubts. God has heard it all. You have never had a fresh doubt or question. This is not to be dismissive of your questionings; it is intended as an encouragement to get them on the table.
Read MoreIn his book on the gospel of Mark, The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank Kermode writes, “we find it hardest to think about what we have most completely taken for granted.” This causes me to ask myself, what do I most completely take for granted, which is a question about presuppositions.
Read MoreKarl Bonhoeffer lost his eldest son in WWI. He lost two others—Dietrich and Klaus—in WWII, both for their participation in the plot to kill Hitler. He also lost the husbands of two daughters, plus many friends. Writing soon after hearing of the deaths of Dietrich and Klaus, he said of that loss, “We are sad, but also proud.”
Read MoreAs a child I knew the world in a very particular manner. I knew that it snowed before Christmas, that bugs were annoying, that the Lakers were magical, and that GI Joes were the best.
Read MoreThis is a “help the author” post. Working on my in-progress book The Skeptical Believer this week, I have created the following very tentative and incomplete list of categories of objections to religious faith in general, and to the Christian faith in particular.
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