I know someone whose religion is a collection of curiosities from across the landscape of world traditions. A little of this and a little of that, thrown together in no systematic or reasonable way, but still very personal and meaningful as far as it goes. If you were to ask this individual what it all reallyContinue reading “On the Other Side of Meaning”
Tag Archives: meaning
Just a Little More Reality (Please)
Constructivism is an approach to understanding the world we live in as a product of our own creative intelligence. “World” refers to the habitat of meaning that human beings construct around themselves for security, to support identity, and to provide a sense of purpose to their lives. As a social species, humans are compelled toContinue reading “Just a Little More Reality (Please)”
A View on Religion
I have a friend who’s in midlife and struggling with the creeping irrelevancy (my term) of his religious beliefs. His personal history with religion (Christianity) doesn’t go all the way back into childhood, but it’s deep enough to have been a significant force in shaping his adult worldview. He and his wife raised their childrenContinue reading “A View on Religion”
No Use for God
Religion is to spirituality as meaning is to mystery, as god is to ground, as belief is to faith, and as body is to soul – if we can resist the old habit of making the second term of each pair into some separate and metaphysical “thing.” These pairs are paradoxical, not antagonistic or merelyContinue reading “No Use for God”
What (your) God is Saying (about you)
Post-theism is not atheism – let’s get that out of the way at the start. To ask about what comes after god is not the same thing as denying the existence of god. But then again, denying the existence of god does not necessarily mean that one is refuting the reality of mystery – orContinue reading “What (your) God is Saying (about you)”
The Time We Have Left
The moment-to-moment phenomenon of experience is difficult to pin down and is probably impossible for us to fully understand, for the paradoxically simple reason that we are always in it. We can’t get the detachment and observational distance to see it objectively. There is no perspective on experience itself since experience is the place whereContinue reading “The Time We Have Left”
The Possible Human
Anderson: “Contemporary civilization without ball games and movies would be as incomprehensible as medieval civilization without the Church. Our social reality is shaped by those myths and structures, our personal lives informed and sometimes inspired by them.” In the early flush of modernity, when the codes of the physical universe were being unlocked right andContinue reading “The Possible Human”
Mystics and Prophets
Robinson: “So let us begin by looking again at the two perspectives on truth represented on the one hand by the Hebraic and on the other by the Vedantic [Hindu], contrasted as the prophetic and the mystical.” We live and die in the round of time. Circles define life, in the rhythms that turn, pulseContinue reading “Mystics and Prophets”
A Theology of Twisters, or a Twisted Theology?
At the latest count (according to several news sources), as many as ten children were killed on May 20, 2013, when a category EF5 tornado ripped through Moore, Oklahoma and destroyed the school where they were seeking refuge. Everyone agrees that it was a tragedy of horrific proportions, not only in the loss of lifeContinue reading “A Theology of Twisters, or a Twisted Theology?”
The Responsibility of Thinking Well
Anderson: “The best way to keep an audience from seeing the weakness in any plot is to step up the sense of menace; the maxim of hack screenwriters is that when things get slow you put a bear on the beach.” There is a narrow bandwidth of intelligence where an individual is able to thinkContinue reading “The Responsibility of Thinking Well”
Tracts of Revolution 