Making Sense of Religion
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Quote of the Day: Cormac McCarthy
Black: “What would you do if Jesus was to speak to you?” White: “Do you imagine that he might?” Black: “No, I don’t. But, but, I’own know.” White: “I’m not virtuous enough.” Black: “No, professor, it ain’t nothing like that. You ain’t got to be virtuous. You just got to be quiet.” Source: From his
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The Judaeo-Christian Cosmogonic Myth
I think that one of the biggest problems with the contemporary West lies in its inability to feel the sacred. And this lack of feeling makes it almost impossible to frame a plausible cosmology open to transcendence. We look at the starry sky above us and we feel something that science simply is inadequate to
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The Mythos of Redemptive Violence vs. the Christian Chiastic Mythos
Myth provides the framework for any comprehension we have about moral truth–that's the way it was for the ancients, and that's the way it is for us. Mythos operates at a level deeper than what we call "belief systems", because belief systems are too rational, too open to comparison in a market of competing belief
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Rest in Peace, Bob Smith
I've just returned from the funeral of Bob Smith, one of my oldest and dearest friends. He was undergoing cancer treatment, but his prognosis was good. I spoke to him a week or so before he died and he sounded great. One person who spoke to him the day before he died said he sounded
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Some Thoughts on Christian Liberty
Whatever the nature of my politics, it should be clear that I am by no means a theological liberal. I acknowledge that in order to develop a high level of spiritual maturity, it is necessary to restrain one's open-ended freedom in order to submit to one kind or another of spiritual discipline, just as it
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The “Lost” Sensibility
Heather Havrileski at Salon doesn't have it: Damn you, "Lost"! We went and jumped on your bandwagon way back in the first season, got sucked into your endless jungley maze and suspenseful chords, and waited breathlessly for the next shoe to drop, over and over again. Remember when that was still fun? Remember? Henry Gale's
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Walker Percy’s Postmodern Catholicism
Why was he a Catholic? Because he believed that the Church's teachings are true; and because the Church, in his view, stood above and apart from the present age, which he called the age of the "theorist-consumer." In his view, the present age has no use for anything that cannot be bought and sold or
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Ideas Matter II
I embrace the idea that we humans never know the truth in any direct way, and that all we have is provisional "interpretations". But some interpretations are better than others because there is a Good that those interpretations bear a closer or more distant relationship to. I know that this is not how moderns think,
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The Zeitgeist of Unbelief
[Ed. note: I'll be revisiting several older posts with the idea of trying to regain my footing concerning the cultural-sphere themes that have always been the primary concern of ATF. Several of the key posts in this area are found in the "Don't Miss" section on the left side of the page. But I feel