The Eagle & Child

I’ve dived (dove? doven?) right into my reading for this semester.  The first book I started is Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (a mouthful with the subtitle).  It’s written from a sociological perspective and one [...]

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Today this question came to mind: “Why do we believe in Christ?”* My childhood answer would have been, “So that I can go to heaven.”  I think that continues to be the answer of many mature Christians as well.  Maybe the answer would be more nuanced–something like, “Because he died for me/my sins.”  Or perhaps [...]

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David Bentley Hart has written a rather searingly critical essay on “The New Atheists” (e.g. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris). He laments the loss of the true skeptic of yesteryear (such as Hume, Neitzche, et al) and the shallowness of the New Atheists. It’s a very long essay.  But from what I can tell, Hart is a [...]

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(My December 2008 Bob Ross post has consistently been the most active and most visited post since then.  Bizarre.  It’s the Dark Side of the Moon of my posts.) I nearly skipped community chapel today, but I noticed that it was to be an Eastern Orthodox service of thanksgiving. It was led by a man [...]

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I handed in a paper today, one which has been looming over my semester, bogging me down, for several weeks now. Contrary to what I had expected, the “loominosity” hasn’t lifted.  This might be because the paper was fairly open-ended, so I had to set boundaries to it which seemed somewhat arbitrary to me.  It [...]

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Another classic by Bruce Cockburn: “World of Wonders”, and somewhat relevant to my last post, I think. Lyrics: Stand on a bridge before the cavern of night Darkness alive with possibility Nose to this wind full of twinkling lights Trying to catch the scent of what’s coming to be (in this…) World of wonders… Somewhere [...]

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From Girl Meets God: I have written [in my prayer book] this, from Diana Eck’s Encountering God: The Latin credo means literally “I give my heart.”  The word believe is a problematic one today, in part because it has gradually changed its meaning from being the language of certainty so deep that I could give [...]

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I grew up in Baptist circles, where baptism is only for those who have made a conscious decision to follow Christ–”believer’s baptism” it is called.  Infant baptism is a no-no in that group–it is invalid, non-binding, what have you. I now belong to a denomination in which both infant baptism and believer’s baptism is practiced. [...]

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Some of you might have noticed the question I posted on Twitter and Facebook yesterday: how do you reconcile the existence of a good God with suffering? Some of you even responded. I asked this question out of sheer frustration with my multiple failed attempts at expressing my thoughts in response to David Bentley Hart’s [...]

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Does [the Bible] match up with scientific evidence? Who cares? … I do not believe science, history or archaeology of any kind establishes the truthfulness of the scripture in any way. Scripture is true by virtue of God speaking it. If God spoke poetry, or parable, or fiction or a prescientific description of creation, it [...]

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