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Back when I was a kid, I had a paper route. It wasn’t very large: seventy-some houses, fifty-five of which got the newspaper daily, all in our immediate neighborhood. Unusually for many jobs, there were no days off. Though the route took less than two hours on a bad day to get done, […] Awhile back, some poster on a Christian discussion forum who had a habit of teasing the Christians said something about how Christianity is a faith built on guilt and fear. And I read that, and my mouth kinda hung open for a moment. And I realized how diametrically opposed that is to the […] I’m wondering how long it will take before philosophy finally learns to separate how and why. I’m fully aware of the way why is used in English: it’s a substitution for “what makes it do that?” in both the mechanical and volitional sense. But I think it would do us all an enormous […] I don’t like to be weak. Who does? I mean, it’s hardwired into us, the drive to take control. To decide how things go. Not just to get our own food or choose our own clothes, but to have others listen to us and do what we desire, to order our […] It is easy, some days, to feel very, very small. We don’t like to let ourselves. I know I don’t. I like to be the heroine of my little story. Oh, y’know, I’ve got a future and a destiny and I’ve got talents and I can go out and do things! ‘Cause I’m […] It is the occupational hazard of being a naturally law-abiding person and growing up in a functional, spiritually grounded home that I should find it easy to underestimate things like grace. And to find it difficult to believe that wrongs can be transformed or that whatever I have gotten myself into, God is […] Sometimes I love being wrong. People who’ve known me a long time will probably laugh at that. If you’d told me ten years ago that I’d ever like being wrong, I would have laughed too (albeit a bit nervously). ‘Cause my mom still tells stories about the way I would come […] This world has nothing for me, and this world has everything. All that I could want and nothing that I need. – “This World”, Caedmon’s Call There are people who reject that God exists because they say he is merely a construct of what humans expect. There are people who reject that God exists because […] Was thinking yesterday – it being 9/11 – about how sadness is necessary. It’s the inverse of something I’ve heard an atheist say, that in an unfeeling, impersonal, chaotic universe, joy is a fleeting thing, so we have to cling to it. G. K. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy that he believed that something […] |
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