Faith
Thoughts about how Christianity affects our every day lives
Jesus died a criminal's death. He was executed in the most brutal method the Romans had at their disposal, crucifixion. And his closest friends were very afraid that their death was next. Other than John, the men who had been in his close band of disciples didn't even witness his execution. The ...
I have written a lot about the benefits of Christianity, but if Christianity is just about satisfying my emotional needs, well, how do I know that it's true? Maybe it's just a powerful story that makes me feel good, much like the comfort of watching a movie where it all turns out right in the end. ...
(Note to readers: the posts that will go up this week come from a series of talks I gave last month. If you'd like to read the earlier talks, go back to November and look at posts named Life With God, Life Without God, and then in December, Life with God.)
As regular readers of this blog may ...
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found.
Joy to the World, the Savior reigns!
Let men their songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy.
Joy to the World , the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing.
It's a little late in the game, but I've been meaning to recommend a book: God With Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas. It's a beautiful (including color pictures of major works of art throughout the centuries) book with reflections on Advent by poets, theologians, and other writers, including ...
Two quotations worth pondering, the first from one of the most influential thinkers of the past two centuries:
"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the ...
New Post on the Park Forum: "Obama's Take on Good and Evil"
New Post on the Park Forum: Ethics and Immigration.
Incidentally, I recommend reading the NYT article upon which this is based. Not every day that a pastor prays his way onto a plane in order to comfort an Indonesian at risk of deportation...
A Catholic friend of mine texted me earlier in the week to remind me it was the "Feast of the Immaculate Conception." Her message read: "Think about how her (Mary's) yes shaped our faith."
I don't spend much time thinking about Mary, and I suspect this lack of attention is my loss. Nonetheless, I thought ...
I had the chance to speak with two high school creative writing classes yesterday. I read portions of Penelope Ayers and they asked questions–How did you decide to make this story public? How many times did you rewrite the opening chapters? (And by the way, the answer there is somewhere between 30 and ...
Matthew 1:23, quoting from the prophet Isaiah: "The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel, which means, ‘God with us'." God didn't advertise His love and presence for us by billboards in the sky. Instead, he came down and lived among us in the ...
In case you're just tuning in, this post is part of a series based on talks I gave a few weeks back. It's picking up on the idea that if we, as humans, are to know of God's existence, it is up to God to let us know:If I were God, how would I cross the ontological divide? How would I let everyone ...
Two follow up thoughts on the previous post.
One, driving up I-95 with two screaming children on Thursday night made me wonder whether I was delusional in writing about the joy of having children. Of course, what I wrote about was the joy that comes in self-sacrifice, and the drive wasn't exactly self-sacrificial ...
New post on the Park Forum: Mammograms and Mortality
I've been thinking recently of the idea that Christians are called to self-sacrificial love, to carry our cross, etc. And I look at my life and wonder–do I do this? On some level, I'm sure the answer is no. But on another level, yes. I just don't think of it as self-sacrifice.
When William cries in ...
Two years ago, we had a group of seniors over for dinner to talk about science and religion. Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, an agnostic and an atheist, all sitting around our table together. It was a good conversation, but at the end of the night, they seemed to agree that it was impossible ...
