People who believe in God but don’t believe that creation is teleologically imbued essentially believe in a dumb God, likely a God who merely exists to serve their own purposes.  Teleology has a troublesome way of pushing back on our disordered desires, and I suspect that this is largely the reason we don’t, and in […]

I am a transcendent sexual essentialist! Yes, this sounds like I am making a confession, perhaps a confession that requires the custom category for gender on Facebook, or that I’m coming out of the closet for some kind of gender related issue. Actually, in a way I am, but I am not making a statement of […]

What does it mean to put one’s name in quotes? I realize that people are not apt to do this, but on a lark I recently did so (I am quite impulsive), and having done so, it made me wonder what the significance of this action would be. The deal is, if one puts the […]

A former student of mine has been coming into the ASC where I work, and in the process of conducting research for her senior thesis, she has been giving me the wonderful opportunity to discuss all things Chesterton, and Chesterton like (or as she would say, Chestertonian). Anyways, she recently responded to one of my […]

Quiet a few days Paula, our friend Simon Jones, and I were discussing religion and culture during which Simon showed us a clip from the film Religulous in which Bill Maher goes to The Holy Land Experience (A theme park that the proprietors refer to as “a living biblical history museum) to confront Christians with […]

What can we know about our thinking given that we have to use our thinking to examine our thinking? In other words, can the instrument of thinking become the object of its own instrumentality? Before you jump into a response, keep in mind that such an inquiry would require the use of the very thing […]

I listen to NPR and I find it to be an overall evenhanded source of information about a variety of issues and events in American society. I have friends who would disagree. I chalk this difference up to the fact that my friends are situated a bit more right than I, and thus there is […]

Occasionally I’ve had an exchange with someone who presented a fact or a series of facts while either declaring or implying that they speak for themselves. During such moments I am often reminded of an instance when Ronald Reagan misquoted John Adams by saying, “Facts are stupid things,” instead of, “Facts are stubborn things.” I […]

When I was an undergrad studying intellectual history my whole focus was on understanding the dominant ideas of a given age, how those ideas were possibly related to one another, and how earlier ideas contributed to the development of later ideas. As I am preparing to enter into a doctorate program in history (at some […]

Nietzsche once said, “That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts.” So, here are a few words: God, justice, love, truth, salvation, holiness, faith, and goodness, which according to Nietzsche are all signs that point to empty and dead realities. Being a Christian, I, of course, resist his assertion and […]