Two apologies for apologetic
Raphael Sanzio da Urbino, Study for St. Paul Preaching in Athens, 1515. Source: raphaelsanzio.org. This work shows St. Paul atop the Aeropagus in Athens, defending Christianity to a bunch of cranky philosophers I must apologize. Twice. Just last week I began my third and final year of seminary. Which means I’ve been reading all kinds [...]
Some Baptists just can’t keep their heads
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Salome with the Head of the Baptist c. 1609. Source: caravaggio-foundation.org In the last month a friend of mine at church has sent me some interesting stories provided by the Associated Baptist Press. Both have to do with statements made by faculty and administration of the once-great Southern Baptist Theological Seminary [...]
Thoughts on solitude
Marc Chagall, Elijah Touched by an Angel, from the Bible suite, 1958. Image source: The Jewish Museum, New York Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, ‘So may the gods do to me, and more [...]
Man, John of the Cross sure could have used some selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Then he could have avoided that whole Dark Night thing
Francisco Antonio Gijón (1653–c. 1721) and unknown painter (possibly Domingo Mejías), Saint John of the Cross, c. 1675. Painted and gilded wood. Image source: National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund St. John of the Cross was a 16th-century Spanish Carmelite friar who is perhaps best known for his poem and discourse Dark Night [...]
Bruno would love this
Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was an Italian Dominican friar who had some radical ideas about the world. He thought that the universe was made of discrete particles (atoms), that the Sun was a nearby star, that the Earth orbited the Sun, and that the other stars had planets too. He did not see the universe as [...]
Nonsense for the rest of us
Benozzo Gozzoli, The Glory of Saint Thomas Aquinas. 1468-1484. Source: Wikimedia Commons. The speech bubble is of 21st-century provenance One of the pillars of the “New Atheism” (there’s nothing new about it) is that theology is a naked emperor. That is, theology is nonsense, through and through. And theologians, even really smart ones, are fundamentally [...]
Welcome to the boundary: dragons, dark, a desert
Detail of the Carta marina, one of the first maps of Scandinavia, by Olaus Magnus, 1593. Click on the image to get a beautiful high-resolution reproduction of the entire map At the boundaries, knowledge gives out. The simplest example of this is the edges of old maps that say things like, “Here there be dragons.” [...]
Po and Gus know what’s up in Jackson Hole
Here’s a nice quote from Huang Po, a 9th-century Chinese Zen master: The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see. What this means to me is that it is unwise to cling to your ideas, because your ideas are eventually going to run [...]
(Learned) ignorance is bliss
Nicholas of Cusa, by the Master of the Life of the Virgin “If we can fully attain unto [knowledge of our ignorance], we will attain unto learned ignorance. For a man — even one very well versed in learning — will attain unto nothing more perfect than to be found to be most learned in [...]
