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Dec 22

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An Atheist Christmas Homily

Due to the nature of my thesis work, my radar is unnaturally (and often annoyingly) tuned to any and all occurrences of the word “atheist”—especially when found in conjunction with the word “Jesus.” For the first part of this opinion piece by Andre Comte-Sponville in today’s Washington Post I was thinking, “OK, here we go again… another angry atheist, endlessly ranting about the evils of superstition, the innumerable deleterious social effects of Christianity, etc, etc.” Read more

Dec 19

Death, the Enemy

Sitting here in the library on a dreary, rainy December day, I find myself thinking about death—which is ironic, and perhaps a little morbid considering the fact that we’re in a season of the year which is focused on the birth of Christ, who came to give us new life. Nevertheless, I’ve been mulling over a conversation I had with a student on the last day of the class I taught at CBC this past semester—a conversation in which she wondered why I had presented death as the ultimate “enemy” of humanity in my final lecture. “Why do we need to see death as an enemy?” she asked. “Why not just look at it as a normal part of life and make the most of the time we have?” Read more

Dec 14

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The Adopted God

I’ve been reading John Swinton’s Raging with Compassion off and on for the last couple of weeks, and have appreciated his challenge to move past the logical problem of evil in order to focus on active resistance of evil. Swinton is less interested in a series of disembodied arguments about evil than he is in reflecting on how evil can be resisted and transformed within the life and practices of the Christian community—how we can live faithfully in the midst of an ambiguous world where unanswered questions remain as we wait God’s redemption of the whole of creation. Read more

Dec 11

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A Two-Pronged Hope

A lot of the reading I am doing for my thesis is related to the idea of hope—how it provides an account both of the “unfinished” or “unsatisfactory” state of the natural world and the existence of human beings who expect and long for better from the world. I recently came across this quote from Nicholas Wolterstorff, from a chapter in The Future of Hope, which I feel captures these two themes well: Read more

Dec 4

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Down to Earth (A Lesson in Pedagogical Humility)

Well, my first foray into the academic world on the other side of the lectern is rapidly drawing to a close. Today marked the beginning of my last week of classes in what has been a fairly enjoyable and challenging adventure. I suppose many people’s first experience as a teacher is a weird combination of exhilaration and terror and my experience has certainly been no different. I always find myself second-guessing myself on the drive home: “Could I have explained that better?” “Was that a helpful exercise?” “Why didn’t I think of that response in class?” etc, etc. Read more