Many of us of a liberal theological bent consider religions in the category of stuff human beings in our communal groupings have made up over the millennia in order to survive and thrive on this planet. Human ideas are socially and historically “conditioned.” Philosophies and religions — and the truths and gods they claim — are “true” because they have… Read More »Historicism: On Knowing That We Are Making It Up
Critical race theory has become a football in the US culture wars. Here’s what critical theory is about.
The question became what position the most protesting of Protestants would look like, and . . . there was no general consensus on that theological point. Many thought the logical candidate for the far left was Humanism.
We live in stories. We live so deeply and completely in stories that it’s hard to see the narratives that we live inside as narratives. In unexamined life, the stories we have been told and the stories we’ve learned to tell ourselves appear to be “reality.” In order to see the stories for what they are, we have to stop, take a… Read More »Going Meta with G.K. Chesterton
Religion. It is emotion, all the way down. It is pre-verbal. It is pre-conceptual.
The pandemic has created a space for introspection and interiority, two things that American consumer culture have long functioned to curtail.
The philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535–475 BCE) once said, “History is a child building a sandcastle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of human power in the world.”
The term “lived experience” has come into vogue in popular usage because it is a useful concept.
To state the obvious, it isn’t easy being human. We have a lot of plates to spin. Or torches to juggle. Irons to put into the fire. Some metaphor of that sort.
History too often gets told badly. One consequence of that is that we tend to know so few instances of individuals making a difference that we can feel powerless to affect the future. That is an illusion created by the way in which we tell the stories.
