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Carving Idols
“What use is an idol once its maker has shaped it — a cast image, a teacher of lies? For its maker trusts in what has been made, though the product is only an idol that cannot speak!” Habakkuk 2:18 NRSV-CI All We See is the Shadow As we will explore further in other posts…
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Yes, Virginia, there is a Sanity Clause
“The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” Luke 17:20-21 Do You See What I See? The most reprinted newspaper editorial in history first appeared in 1897 in the New…
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Faith is a Strange Loop
“But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” John 3:21 NRSV-CI Humble Striving Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard used the term ‘sacred tension’ to refer to the tension binding together opposing forces in a paradox. Attempts to resolve…
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Preserving Ambiguity
“The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” F. Scott Fitzgerald Living in Isolation from Ourselves Stated simply, the predicament of modern humans is how to overcome the mundaneness of existence. Walker Percy, the…
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An Imagined Conversation about Faith
The following is a whimsical dialog reminiscent of the interactions between a student and a master that you might find in a Zen koan. The characters are inspired by author Walker Percy and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Percy and his teacher, Kirk the Guardian, sat facing each other, the same way they did every Friday, with…
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The Big Lie
“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.” Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Do We Need a Hierarchy? In…