“Just eight centuries ago, we took from him what Thou didst reject with scorn, that last gift he offered Thee, showing Thee all the kingdoms of the earth. We took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar, and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth…” (Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov) The true homeland on this…
A new article from Christianity Today hit my news feed last week, and it blew me away. The title was: “Top 5 Heresies Among American Evangelicals”. The article is based on a recent survey which found (among other disasters) that 73% of American Evangelicals believe Jesus is a created being. Yes, a full three quarters…
Albert Camus, the famed author of philosophical absurdism, was certainly not the first to propose that life is absurd. The author of Ecclesiastes beat him to it by several centuries. “Vanity of vanities, everything under the sun is vanity,” goes the famous repeated line. I remember the shock I felt reading Ecclesiastes for the first…
Why are Americans agitated and depressed while living in great abundance? I don’t think the premise of this question needs qualifying, but for the sake of argument consider this piece from the Commonwealth Fund. It contains several disturbing statistical charts comparing American mental illness and substance abuse with several other high-income countries. America consistently tops…
Any fan of Carl Jung would be fascinated to hear his take on the current movements of transgenderism, gender fluid, genderqueer, non-binary, etc. But does he give one? Surely the godfather of psychological archetypes has something on the subject in his massive collected works. The answer is a disappointing “no,” and for obvious reasons: (a)…
Anyone who has tried to incorporate both faith and reason in their practical life has run into this temptation. It usually goes something like: God is my plan A, but if at some point he doesn’t act I’ll be forced to go with plan B. This is totally what Abraham did when raising the knife…
Xenophon says of Socrates that he “was not eager to make his companions orators and businessmen and inventors, but thought that they should first possess moderation. For he believed that without moderation those abilities only enabled a person to become more unjust and to work more evil.” This is why we speak of modern knowledge…
Study the literature long enough and you will discover something curious about most discussions of environmentalism—there is a strange lack of effort to define human nature. I believe this is why most attempts at solving our massive ecological problems are going nowhere fast. Without a shared paradigm concerning what a human is, the whole environmentalist…
Slowly making my way through Augustine’s “City of God” for the first time (to my great shame) has been a treasure trove of theological Aha! moments. The most recent of which came yesterday while reading through book XV where Augustine discusses why God accepted Abel’s offering and rejected Cain’s. I remember this being a much-disputed…
I wonder how many of our problems today are linked to the loss of our sense of wonder. I had a client this morning who was lamenting his inability to be playful with his wife and kids. His is a common story of a work-from-home, self-employed parent and spouse who has a difficult time separating…
Could it be that first Biblical story is not the story of creation, nor of the fall, but that of Job? If the book of Job predates all other books in the Bible, as some contend*, it would mean that the great Judeo-Christian tradition begins with theodicy: why do the righteous suffer? It begins not…
It used to be that teachers prided themselves on presenting a subject to their students from a non-bias perspective, actively attempting to falsify their own beliefs on the subject, leaving it to the student to think through the subject and come to their own reasoned conclusions. This was my experience in my graduate studies in…
A major problem between the social justice movement and Christianity can be found in early Critical Theory. Max Horkheimer (head of the Frankfort School in the 1930’s and pioneering figure of Critical Theory) found in German idealism an “inherently bourgeois philosophy,” containing elements that posed serious threats to the progress of social justice. For Horkheimer,…
Sexual love is the strongest experience of satisfaction; in fact, it is the prototype of all happiness. Thus, we humans should make genital erotism the central point of our lives. The degree to which you approve or disapprove of this statement determines, in large part, your relationship to the modern ethos of Western culture. The…
Boredom is one of those self-defining words. For me, the experience of ‘bore-dom’ feels like something boring a hole through my soul, like a hand drill boring a hole through wood. Boredom is a suffering, yet a suffering caused not by something happening, but by nothing happening. (Just as I am editing this article to…
For me the role of philosophy in Christian faith has always been something like Anselm’s famous motto: “faith seeking understanding.” When applied to the faith, Philosophy is just faith seeking understanding, useful for synthesizing with reason those things initially accepted by faith. Philosophy offers the chance to know those things which the faith preaches. Didn’t…
If it was required to jog a mile every time one bemoaned 2020 as being the worst year ever, America would be the healthiest country in the world. If they had to eat a chalk of broccoli every time they imagined that 2021 would save them, oh my God, we would hardly need a healthcare…
Why have the Jews suffered so much persecution throughout history? This is a typical question that comes up after one realizes just how constant the persecution of Jew has been, and history offers no shortage of scholars to answer it. Admittedly I am no such scholar. At best I am a cursory observer of the…
Existential isolation! A phrase virtually nobody speaks of these days, yet is the human phenomenon to blame for much of what is both great and destructive in the human experience. Without the means to gain a healthy acquaintance with one’s isolation there is no limit to the neurotic reactions it can provoke in a person,…
It used to really bug me when people would use the phrase, “your truth.” It always seemed to me a convenient evasion from the hard work of sober thinking, of confronting difficult truths about life and self, a denial of Truth itself. What I discovered is that many people indeed use it for these purposes,…
You certainly don’t need religion to have a sense of guilt. You don’t even need religion to be totally overcome by guilt. All you need is a sense of an ideal self—some version of a hero-project going on in your head—and you are a lifelong candidate for guilt. The atheist is always tempted to believe…
"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced" -Kierkegaard
Doctrine Matters
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