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All Things are Become New
Last Saturday was the official dedication of the beautiful new humanities building on my campus. I shared the speaker platform with David Mccullough! I even got to participate for the first time in my...
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The Crucifix Train
Moving day on a Catholic campus is a bit different than on other campuses. The large interdisciplinary program that I direct was moved a couple of months ago into our new fabulous humanities building,...
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It’s Not a Holy Relic!
In Milos Forman’s 1984 Academy Award winning film Amadeus, Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, played by Jeffrey Jones of Ferris Buehler’s Day Off fame, is most of the time an enlightened ruler who makes his...
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Raising the Bar
One of my greatest joys as a philosophy professor is that I get to be bad on a regular basis. There were a number of people about whom I was told little growing up, other than that they are dangerous...
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Come In, and Come In
Once many years ago, a couple I was close friends with was having marital problems. For the first (and only) time in my life, I found myself frequently playing the role of telephone confessor and...
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Stranger in a Strange Land
As I stood in line at the campus Dunkin’ Donuts, I was truly thanking God that it was 9:15 on Friday morning. Not because of the usual TGIF thing, although Fridays are generally fine. In my life, 9:15...
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Red and Blue Bubbles
As Jeanne and I do various things in the house on Saturdays, we often have NPR on. This past Saturday, however, our local NPR station was in the midst of fund-raising, interrupting the shows we wanted...
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Conversion
Conversion is an odd phenomenon. I’ve often observed that those who convert, who ”tum around” radically in some aspect of their lives, tend to embrace their newly adopted beliefs and behaviors with a...
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Random Harvest
A new HBO miniseries called “The Leftovers” started its first season a couple of weeks ago. This is the sort of series that I usually have no interest in—something weird has happened (like a huge...
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Republican Jesus
I’m not sure how I became a liberal. I was raised in a conservative, fundamentalist religious world that frowned on liberal activities such as dancing and going to movies; left-leaning political...
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A Gnawing Suspicion
A mystic is anyone who has the gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradictions, and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity. Lawrence Kushner A...
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The Ghosts of Jesus Past
Toward the end of a particularly lively and deep seminar with my “Living Stones” adult Christian education group after church a few Sundays ago, I asked the group “so what makes us think that we are...
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But I Might Be Wrong
During the first weeks of the semester I often think about my first weeks as an undergraduate–this time around, exactly forty years ago! In this post from a year ago, I identify the early stages of...
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A Compassionate Capitalist
I had the privilege of giving the sermon at Trinity Episcopal in Cranston, RI yesterday morning. Challenging readings–here’s what I said. What are the responsibilities of those who have to those who do...
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The LTFTU Committee
I have recently been thinking a lot about faculty-administration relations, particularly about the various reasons why they might go bad. There seem to be a lot more of those reasons than there are...
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The Crucifix Train
A bit over a year after moving into our beautiful new humanities building, there is still a great deal of debate and disagreement for what belongs on the walls. With one notable exception. As I wrote...
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Dogmatic Ben Franklin
The blasphemy that attaches to monotheism is the blasphemy of certainty. Richard Rodriguez Every time someone claims that we live in a country founded on “Christian principles,” I think of Benjamin...
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Red and Blue Bubbles
As Jeanne and I do various things in the house on Saturdays, we often have NPR on. This past Saturday, however, our local NPR station was in the midst of fund-raising, interrupting the shows we wanted...
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Strange and Beautiful
Forgive me for name dropping, but I went to dinner with a New York Times best-selling author earlier this month. Twice. Kathleen Norris, author of Dakota, The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace, and a number...
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Come In, and Come In
As I considered with my students this past week one of the most beautiful, challenging, and disturbing true stories I have ever encountered, I was reminded of what I wrote about that story a year ago....
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