The classical atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment, philosophers such as Frederick Nietzsche and Ludwig Feuerbach, taught that all religious experience is simply human projection. God does not exist. We create God, and we create him in our image and likeness, ultimately to serve our needs. We create the notion of God because we need a…
I teach a course on the renowned mystic John of the Cross. Since this is never a required course for any student, I usually begin the first class by asking each student why he or she is interested in this course. The answers vary widely: “I am taking this course because my spiritual director told…
There are parts of scripture that should come with a warning label, the kind they sometimes flash at the end of a movie which reads: “No animals were harmed.” One such text is a story in the Book of Judges (11,29-39). It’s the story of a king named Jephthah who is at war and makes…
No amount of preaching shapes a soul as much as seeing someone living an honest life. If that’s true, and it is, then no marriage course is ever as powerful to teach about marriage as is the witness of a good marriage. I understood this first-hand several years ago when I attended the 50th wedding…
Few things in life are as difficult as the death of a young person, particularly one’s own child. There are many mothers and fathers, with broken hearts, having lost a daughter, a son, or a grandchild. Despite time and even the consolation of faith, there often remains a wound that will not heal. There’s a…
Perhaps in its ideal form, innocence might be described as a human heart stripped of ego and lust, something akin to what James Joyce describes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when his hero, young Steven, sees a half-naked girl on a beach and instead of being moved by sexual desire…
God’s presence inside us and in our world is rarely dramatic, overwhelming, sensational, impossible to ignore. God doesn’t work like that. Rather God’s presence is something that lies quiet and seemingly helpless inside us. It rarely makes a huge splash. We should know that from the very way God was born into our world. Jesus,…
In a book entitled Peculiar Treasures, the renowned novelist and spiritual writer Frederick Buechner reflects on the character of Judas, the man who betrayed Jesus with a kiss and then died by suicide. Buechner, who had lost his own father to suicide, speculates on the reasons why Judas dies by suicide. Referring to an ancient…
Imagine being born blind and living into adulthood without ever having seen light and colour. Then, through some miraculous operation, doctors are able to give you sight. What would you feel immediately upon opening your eyes? Wonder? Bewilderment? Ecstasy? Pain? Some combination of all of these? We now know the answer to that question. This…
Who still reads poetry? In a digital age and in a time when the empirical has for the most part replaced the spiritual, what’s the value of poetry? What does it bring to the table? One of the intellectual giants of our generation, Charles Taylor, in a recent book Cosmic Connections, Poetry in the Age…