Tuesday, November 7, 2023
This post isn’t ready for prime time. It’s not even half baked. It’s still fluid. I want to write about Advent because it’s coming. I want to write about Advent because it implies the incarnation, which is my all-time favorite doctrine. Incarnation is important because it is God the creator entering creation in order to be in community with us. Incarnation is the transcendent becoming immanent. The incarnation is God entering all the messiness of human life.
Tuesday, September 12, 2023
Death and resurrection. It’s the impossibility around which every other impossibility of the Christian faith orbits. (Rachel Held Evans: Searching for Sunday (2015), p. 38) I find the cosmological argument for the existence of God convincing—I can’t conceive of a universe without a first cause. I can believe in the Trinity. I can believe in creation, so long as you give me longer than six days. I struggle with divine intervention in the world, not because I don’t believe God is capable but because of the problem of evil it raises.
Friday, August 18, 2023
A woman driving a minivan nearly hit my daughter on her bicycle today at an intersection where the entrance to a gated community crosses the Virginia Capital Trail. Then she had the gall to honk at her. I pulled in front of her car and let her know very firmly (without profanity) that cars are legally required to yield to cyclists in a crosswalk, even if there is an (unofficial) stop sign on the trail.
Thursday, August 17, 2023
For God so loved the world. Not all the white American Christians. Not all the people who loved him. Not even all the people. The World. The Cosmos. All of it. God loves creation, because it is good. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world [κόσμος/cosmos] that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
Tuesday, August 15, 2023
David James Duncan speaks of “unsaying God”, that is, apophasis—theology defined by what God is not. God has been badly defined by so many people and so many traditions that we need to strip the baggage away from the name and treat it as we would any other—someone we are getting to know. I had much the same thought yesterday, then lost it, so I was happy to read it again in God Laughs & Plays.
Tuesday, August 15, 2023
I’ve been thinking about my approach to faith and how I am unsure of anything anymore, and I’m wondering how to describe it. Am I confused? I don’t think so. Confusion implies some level of discomfort, and I’m remarkably mellow about this. Perhaps my attempts to learn mindfulness have taken hold enough that I’m simply noticing and wondering—exploring the possibilities. I can be obsessively curious, but this doesn’t even feel like that.
Friday, August 4, 2023
This ridiculously cute little guy was at the Rochester Pride Parade in June. I sent this pic to his person because I’m a geek and I like to share. :-) Taken on my Canon RP with 24-105mm lens. Transferred wirelessly to Canon app on my phone and sent to doggo’s person’s phone via AirDrop. See, being a geek is a good thing.
Friday, August 4, 2023
I take lots of photos on my commute. Of course, my commute is along the Erie Canal. This shot was a little tricky because I was trying to get a sharp, well composed image while the wind was blowing this little flower all over the frame—this is a surprisingly common problem when shooting outside in breeezy meadows and along canal paths. I think I mostly succeeded.
Friday, August 4, 2023
I have tons of photos, and I don’t post enough of them. Here’s one more: I’m not sure if this is a dragonfly or a damselfly. At any rate, it landed on my ring while I was riding down Scottsville Road, and I tried to take a quick picture with my phone camera. I figured it would fly away if I tried to pull out my little Canon, and I was right—it took off in the process of taking this, probably because I was careening all over the shoulder.
Friday, August 4, 2023
August 4, 2023 This one was tough. I originally wrote a pretty antiseptic description of the issue, then realized what a gut wrenching, soul sucking struggle this has been for me. My 20s were spent in a lonely search for a father figure—I learned to love my dad, but he could never be the nurturing presence I needed. At his funeral, I sobbed because there was no longer any hope for resolution of the tangled mess he’d left behind.
Sunday, July 30, 2023
I am anticipating seeing the Barbie movie with a mixture of excitement and dread. It’s a Greta Gerwig film, which means it will be a sharp and funny satire of Barbie, Mattel, and our ridiculously consumerist culture. On the other hand, my name is Ken, and this is a movie about . . . Barbie. My nemesis. The name which, unwisely wielded, can move me to violence. My cross to bear.
Saturday, July 29, 2023
This is about my State of Faith project but not actually part of it—kind of a meta-post. I’m not entirely done with the deconstruction part, but I’ve documented the snot out of why I’m no longer even Evangelical adjacent and maybe not even Christian. I want to start writing about something positive—what I’m constructing now. I hesitate to call it reconstruction because I don’t want to simply replace one rickety system with another.
This is a funky tree I saw growing along Irondequoit Creek on a bike ride through Ellison Park
Thursday, July 13, 2023
July 13, 2023 I’ve been working on this for ages, and I need to publish something, so here it is. I’ll likely come back to this post and refine it—it certainly isn’t in a final form, but it is a good start. Atonement I could be accused of burying the lede here, because changing my view of atonement, actually, just learning there were alternative views of atonement, was the first domino that fell and knocked down a whole series of beliefs.
Saturday, June 3, 2023
August 4, 2023 Experiential Problems with Faith This one was tough. I originally wrote a pretty antiseptic description of the issue, then realized what a gut wrenching, soul sucking struggle this has been for me. My 20s were spent in a lonely search for a father figure—I learned to love my dad, but he could never be the nurturing presence I needed. At his funeral, I sobbed because there was no longer any hope for resolution of the tangled mess he’d left behind.
Sunday, May 28, 2023
May 28, 2023 This is a tough one because we all want a God who can intervene on our behalf. I mean, what good is a God who is all powerful but can’t or won’t use that power to give us a hand? What are miracles? Are they God benevolently helping people out of a tough spot? Altering natural laws? What if favoring one person harms another? Be careful of what you wish for, the folks tales tell us—unintended consequences lurk behind our wishes, and they can be far worse than our original plight.
Wednesday, May 24, 2023
May 24, 2023 This gets a bit technical, so first, a few Greek words (from a non-theologian): ** Sṓma** (also sárx): the physical body, flesh. Sárx can be used of a corpse. ** Psyché**: soul, life. The life force which leaves the body at death and goes to the underworld. ** Pneúma**: spirit, literally breath. This is very similar to soul but also implies that which can commune with the divine.
Wednesday, May 24, 2023
Updated June 3, 2023 Any discussion of the existence and nature of God must take seriously the problem of evil. If God is the omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenvolent being of classical theology, then how does this perfectly good deity cause or, at minimum, tolerate the presence of evil in creation? Theodicies comprise an entire branch of theology devoted to answering how a good God and evil can coexist. The subject is far too complex and deep for me to cover here, and it may be the single knottiest problem in all of theology; however, I can’t simply ignore it.
Tuesday, May 23, 2023
May 23, 2023 Evangelicals (especially Calvinists) like to define the attributes of God, most of which can also be called perfections: Omnipotence—God is all powerful. God can do anything except that which is logically inconsistent (e.g., making a rock so heavy that they1 cannot lift it2) or inconsistent with God’s perfect nature (e.g., lying). Omniscience—God knows all that occurs in creation, including all of our thoughts. God knows all truth. Eternality—God has always existed.
Tuesday, May 23, 2023
May 23, 2023 I’m taking a little different tack here and jumping around in my posts to topics or sections I’ve been able to get into a publishable form. Philosophy, in particular, has been difficult for me, because I have very little training in the subject. I’m trying to be as accurate and fair as possible, but don’t be surprised if I get some details wrong. Oh, I’m also bringing in some Greek words, and I’m bound to screw that up.