Category: The Journey of Faith
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Do You Know God?
My childhood was surrounded with very committed Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians. Street preaching was quite common and even expected. In the downtown, the bus stopped in front of the Dollar Store before it made its trip to the Southside where I lived. Those waiting for buses were a captive audience. Saturdays especially brought bright young men…
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The True Science of God
I had occasion this week to stand in a group of scientists. I was burying one of their own. The city I live in is a “science city,” the location of one of the primary national labs in the US. I have lived here for over 25 years. I have gotten to know many scientists.…
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Feeling Like a Fool
No one wants to feel like a fool. When it happens, our faces flush, we turn our eyes away (usually towards the ground). We usually want to hide or disappear, and, just as likely the burn in our face quickly passes to the hot burn of anger. Often what follows are words or actions we…
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God By The Numbers
Math is very strange stuff. A serious question within the community of science and math is whether math is an invention or a discovery. Is it something that we have just made up out of our head, or is it something we observed and discovered (because it is already there)? This might sound like a…
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When Belief Is Complicated
“It’s complicated.” This statement sums up much of the modern experience. I don’t think the world we encounter is actually complicated – but our experience is. Simplicity is the reflection of an inner world free of conflicts and undercurrents. The truth of the modern inner-world is that it is generally pulled in many directions. Modernity is…
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A Faerie Apocalypse
Somewhere in the late 60’s (my teen years), I found myself home recuperating from an appendectomy. In those days they actually recommended a period of convalescence before returning to normal activities (today’s medical advice, written in insurance offices, deems recuperation to be a needless bit of a money-drain). But I suddenly had extra time on…
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Atheism and the Imagination
Einstein was famous for his “thought experiments.” He worked his way into radical new insights, not through careful research in a laboratory, but through careful work in the imagination. The same is true for almost all work in cosmology. You cannot simply observe the data generated from particle experiments and announce a conclusion. What is…
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The Poetry of God
Whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet. – St. Pophyrios of Kavsokalyvia St. Porphyrios made this statement in the context of love and suffering: That’s what it is! You must suffer. You must love and suffer–suffer for the one you love. Love makes effort for the loved one. She runs all through…
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The Cross as the Way of Life
Our lives make sense. This may not always seem to be true, but it is. For each of us, there are inner principles that guide our decisions and prioritize our actions. Life is not entirely random. Much of that inner sense of things is not conscious. The day becomes very busy, and we can’t stop and…
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Messiness in the Modern World
Salvation can be messy. I believe this with all my heart and so I state it at the outset of this article. As such, it marks me as a heretic in Modernity. I not only believe that salvation is messy – I believe that messiness is pretty much inherent to salvation. And along with that,…
Sophia, I saw this and thought it might be of use: Mother Siluana on Suffering