So what does a person like me do in a culture in which displaying anger is taken as a necessary sign of commitment and moral seriousness?
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One way I think about the current state of public discourse is in terms of four birds, the chicken, the peacock, the ostrich, and the owl.
Read MoreIs The Great Gatsby a crime novel? Crime and Punishment? Moby Dick?
Read MoreWhat I think the Christmas story should call up instead is admiration for Christianity’s first evangelists and a determination on our part to tell the story of the good news with as much passion and joy as they did.
Read More“I have never really left Pennsylvania, that is where the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.” So says the late John Updike.
Read MoreMost everyone seems to know what to think about Ferguson. I don’t.
Read MoreDan Wakefield has an article I enjoyed in the latest IMAGE journal about his long-time friendship with the tolerant atheist (the words don’t always go together) Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut.
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Grant Petersen was thrilled with his second place medal. While some of the players on the high school basketball team for which he is the manager sulked after losing the championship game, when Grant heard his name called…
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We arrived in Ireland, a motley group of poetry lovers (some faking it), on the day in 1995 that it was announced that Seamus Heaney had won the Noble Prize for Literature.
Read More“Lacking intensity in our lives, we say that we are distant from God and then seek to make that distance into an intense experience.”
Read MoreI’m reading with pleasure the poet Christian Wiman’s memoir, My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer. With a poet’s gift for fresh words to express old ideas (“the hive-like certainties of churches”), he ruminates over his unlikely return to faith after decades away.
Read MoreI 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…
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