How Modern Art Led Me to God

There was a recent controversy in Tacoma, Washington because the Tacoma Art Museum considered showing the work of an artist named David Wojnarowicz. Specifically, they wanted to show a video montage he put together that was pulled by the Smithsonian because it was too offensive. The Tacoma museum’s curator responded to critics by saying, “For someone to come and have to confront this image, it’s not going to be easy but art’s not easy.” Curious about what this non-easy art might... Read More

Why Something Rather than Nothing?

After a night of teenage exuberance, my friends and I would usually end up lying out on a country road, gazing up at the starlit Australian sky, discussing the meaning of it all. We considered ourselves nonreligious, and yet there was something (isn’t there?) about the enormity of the sky that humbled us, stirred us, inspired us to ask deep questions about, well, everything. We called these GLUE conversations—GLUE being an acronym for God, life, the universe, and everything. One of... Read More

Can We Make Sense of the World?

Is reality intelligible?  Can we make sense of it?  Or is the world at bottom an unintelligible “brute fact” with no explanation?  We can tighten up these questions by distinguishing several senses in which the world might be said to be (or not to be) intelligible.  To make these distinctions is to see that the questions are not susceptible of a simple Yes or No answer.  There are in fact a number of positions one could take on the question of the world’s intelligibility –... Read More

Dressgate: Is Perception Reality?

Philosophers are a maligned group these days. Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example, suggested that the paradigmatic philosophical question is not “Why is there something rather than nothing?” but “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” (Cute idea, in other words, but let’s not waste our time.) So when the internet exploded into a full-blown panic over whether a dress was white and gold or black and blue, I know philosophers everywhere slept well that night. No one knew, because... Read More

The Bible and the Question of Miracles: Towards a Christian Response

My previous post at Strange Notions underscored the often-unacknowledged philosophical premises at work when believers and non-believers sit down to debate about things biblical. In the course of my argument, I pointed to a possible area of common ground for Catholics and agnostics/atheists. A survey of statements by thinkers as different as Benedict XVI and Bart Ehrman reveals an important agreement upon the reality that everyone carries their own philosophical presuppositions and that... Read More

Do Christians Believe in Talking Snakes?

You know how the story goes: in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve have a conversation with the serpent. Does this mean Christians believe in talking snakes? That’s the charge from certain atheists. To be a Christian, they assume, you have to believe in talking snakes. But then why are there an awful lot of well-educated, smart Christians? Are they simply all gullible or deluded? This story in Genesis about the talking snake, like many others, has to be interpreted using what experts call... Read More

Stem Cell Research and ‘Science vs. Religion’

A 2005 New York Times article begins: "When Donald Kennedy, a biologist and editor of the eminent journal Science, was asked what had led so many American scientists to feel that George W. Bush's administration is anti-science, he isolated a familiar pair of culprits: climate change and stem cells. These represent, he said, 'two solid issues in which there is a real difference between a strong consensus in the science community and the response of the administration to that consensus.'" There's... Read More

The Catholic Advantage: Why Health, and Happiness, and Heaven Await the Faithful

In his apostolic exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis beckoned Catholics to proudly bring the good news of Catholicism to as many who will listen. He did not call upon Catholics to be callous salesmen, or to triumphantly wear their religion on their sleeves; rather, he asked them to challenge the “sec­ularist rationalism” and the radical individualism that it entails. To be successful, we must provide an alternative, and there is no better tonic for our age than the... Read More

Love and the Skeptic

"The greatest of these," wrote the Apostle Paul, "is love" (1 Cor. 13:13). Many centuries later, in a culture quite foreign to the Apostle to the Gentiles, the singer John Lennon earnestly insisted, "All we need is love." Different men, different intents, different contexts. Even different types of "love." You hardly need to subscribe to People magazine or to frequent the cinema to know that love is the singularly insistent subject of movies, songs, novels, television dramas, sitcoms,... Read More

How TO Talk About God

This is part two of a two-part series, adapted from Stephen Bullivant's new book, The Trinity: How Not to Be a Heretic (Paulist Press, 2015). Read part one here.   "A time to speak" I ended my last post in this short series with the apparent affirmation that silence is the only appropriate mode for Christian thought and prayer. This is what is known as apophatic theology, the “negative way”, or – as I like to call it – the via Alison Krauss-a. Far be it from me to denigrate... Read More

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