What Do We Mean When We Say “I Believe”?
Just as only within an adolescent faith does punishment serve as the reason for desiring relationship with the Divine, so does our fear of the unknown serve as an equally disingenuous rationale for saying we have found certainty. Unless what binds us to truth is anything other than a pursuit to know truth for its own sake (a belief that within the truth comes the only hope for peace, love, forgiveness and progress), we come to our beliefs for deeply impure reasons.The Great Hope of the World
If God is a God of order, then He is honored by the use of the faculty He gave us that separates us from the animals - the ability to use our basic cognition. He has nothing to fear from reason unless He is in fact the God of fundamentalists - a God that does things only because He can and because He chooses to, not because it is the right thing to do. But is this the God we see reflected in the world around us? Is this the God of science?April 2005 Bookshelf
April's list includes a very lengthy biography of Pol-Pot and another compelling book on the role agnostics, deists and freethinkers have played in the preservation of the most noble of America's ideals.Question #6: Why is Homosexuality a Political Issue for the Church?
Homosexuality matters to the modern church in part because it is an easily defined target when more complicated issues such as living well beneath our means so that we can share with those less fortunate than we are, is wholly against the American Dream. Because Christianity has fully embraced the ideal of American opulence, it can not stand for that which defines it and must instead seek out positions that are easier to work people up about and less likely to convict them of their need to change their underlying disposition to life.Book Review: The Coming Anarchy
Kaplan believes, as do the eminent ancient Greek historians we would do well to wrestle with now, that when democracies are at their epoch they become social systems within which the individual is focused almost extensively on their own well being. Kaplan goes a step farther arguing persuasively that this narcissism is an almost inevitable prelude to tyranny.Will Grace be Good Enough?
One of the underlying reasons evil men can come to power is that those in the middle err on the side of believing the best about those they would do well to discerningly distrust. I also fundamentally believe that most people in positions of political influence are of two varieties: they either are in it for the naked pursuit of power, or they are true ideologues. What seems important to me is that too few people who would be called gracious leaders seem to be able to find their voice and offer up alternative visions of the future within this setting, leaving only the weak and the wolves to vie for control.March 2005 Bookshelf
Some of the most provocative books I have read in the last year including Doubt, The End of Faith, my first exposure to Martin Marty, and a superb biography of George Washington.About MysteriousFaith
“If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.”
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