Posts
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A Vegan Fast
Christos anesti. Over the years I’ve used the season of Lent as a sort of laboratory for experiments with truth. Perhaps that’s not the most properly penitential way to go about these 40 days of fasting, which should be more outwardly directed than inwardly, calling us out of ourselves to service, repentance, giving, and recognition…
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A Godly Test
Search magazine has just posted “Evolving Allah,” an article of mine on how people think about evolution in the Middle East. More in-depth than my earlier piece for Seed, it revolves around my interview with Harun Yahya (aka Adnan Oktar), the leader of a Turkish religious community known for his passion for creationism. When Oktar…
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Twitter Ontology
You know how people nowadays, when traveling especially, need to take a picture of everything just to be sure they’ve experienced it? Maybe they actually look at all those pictures. Or some of them. But isn’t the driving force much more that sneaking feeling at the moment of capture, a dizziness with experience that makes…
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How to Give Alms
Let’s start with some exegesis. Matthew 6:2-4. Go. So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not…
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Agency as a Vocation
New on the website of the Social Science Research Council, the interview I did last winter with David Kyuman Kim, a philosopher of religion who grapples with political agency, race, identity, and virtue. He’s also an incredibly gracious person who I’ve been very priviledged to work with at the SSRC. Central to both his work…
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The Multiverse Problem
I’ve got a new article out in Seed about how religious physicists, in particular, are thinking their way around the theological problems posed by multiverse theory. It’s good, mind-bending stuff. Scientists now recognize that if space were expanding at a slightly different speed, or if the strong nuclear force were just a little off, our…
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The Pleasure of the Text
Jean-Luc Marion, at the outset of God without Being: One must admit that theology, of all writing, certainly causes the greatest pleasure. During the year of my becoming a Catholic, that frought and crazy and inevitable year, I bought a New Oxford Annotated Bible from my college bookstore. Its over two thousand pages flop between…
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Showboating for the Prez
This is where I was week before last: With a black hood covering my head, all I could see outside was blurry and dark. The outside couldn’t see in. After an hour of standing still, my muscles began to ache terribly. The cardboard sign I carried felt like a slab of concrete. Sounds blended and…
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Dying, Desperately, Heroic
“To study philosophy,” wrote the French essayist Montaigne, “is to learn how to die.” In medieval times, particularly as the Black Death spread through Europe, the art of dying—ars moriendi—became the goal to which a lifetime of piety was devoted. Sure, a person can get by faking a good life. But a good death? There’s…