The Little Friar

Literature, I think, helps us ask questions about our lives and the things we believe, often in ways that other kinds of books simply can't.  That's because literature opens up our imaginations and language to explore the depths of our soul.  To that end, then, I want to offer a list of those books that have helped me to give words to faith, and sometimes even doubts, of my life.  There's enough diversity here that everyone should be able to find some connections with their lives: Voltaire, Candide (1759) Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899) James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) Franz Kafka, The Castle (1926) Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947) Albert Camus, The Plague (1947) Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951) Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952) Peter de Vries, The Bloo...

Last night, I received this question for "Ask Me Anything".  Serendipituous, too, that I was going to write on something like this anyway, after last night at Resurrection. First, the question: Why did you choose Christianity?  Why choose a religion at all?  Isn't religion just a cop-out?  How can the Christian God be thought of as "good"? Vulnerable Christians in our current intellectual climate often hear these.  First, and most directly:  I didn't choose Christianity; Christianity persuaded me.  Nor did I choose it as "a religion".  I don't believe it's helpful to see Christianity as "a religion".  It was only recently that people began to see Christianity as "a religion" anyway.  "Religions" in this culture are more like the pagan religions of the Roman Empire than the Christian faith that refused to take its place among them as one option among others. Christians see everything in the co...

From a "Confirmation Sermon" Dietrich Bonhoeffer preached on April 9, 1938: You do not have your faith once and for all.  The faith that you will confess today with all your hearts needs to be regained tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, indeed, every day anew.  We receive from God only as much faith as we need for the present day.  Faith is the daily bread that God gives us. You know the story about manna.  This is what the children of Israel received daily in the desert. But when they wanted to store it for the next day, it was rotten.  This is how it is with all the gifts of God.  This is how it is with faith as well.  Either we receive it daily anew or it rots.  One day is just long enough to preserve the faith.  Every morning it is a new struggle to fight through all unbelief, faintheartedness, lack of clarity and confusion, anxiety and uncertainty, in order to arrive at faith and to wrest it from God.  Every morning in your ...

We've now passed the half-way mark in Lent.  I find myself, these days, becoming increasingly reflective on my faith -- its positive practice -- to such an extent that I'm highlighting lately in everyday conversations why I still care to call myself Christian .  So, let me lay it out as plainly as I can.  1.   I believe . Not I know.  Not I think.  Not I feel.  Not I understand.  But I believe.  When I'm in darkness, when I don't know the way, when every step is uncertain, I walk.  I live not by what I know or feel but by a trust that proves itself only after each new step is safely taken.  Living Christianly is a daring thing.  Because discipleship really is dangerous.  I have to commit to following Jesus, to walking the Way, before feeling and thinking are even possible.  2.   In God the Father, almighty, creator of heaven and earth .  I don't believe in magic or manipulation.  Not in divine powers th...

Many of you are aware of Immanuel Kant's famous categorical imperative in ethical theory.  There are many ways to describe the categorical imperative.  One way to describe the categorical imperative is that virtue should always be an end in itself rather than a means to an end.  That is to say, virtue is virtue when it is pursued for its own sake and not being used for some Machiavellian or strategic purpose.  What this means is that virtue isn't always rewarded in the world.  And that's what makes virtue virtue. We might say that virtue isn't an economic transaction with the cosmos. Virtue isn't an exchange where if we do X the cosmos will give us Y.  Of course, we'd always like to have Y, the good outcome.  But if we are truly virtuous the good outcome isn't the root motivation.  We do the right thing regardless , because it's the right thing to do.  Virtue is an end in itself. What I'm wondering about is if there might be a ca...

I was re-reading Mark 14.1-9, the story of the woman at Bethany.  Quite probably like everyone else, I've always read this narrative and focused on that line, "the poor you always have with you".  Today, though, something different:  " She has done a beautiful thing". What strikes me so much about this line?  The Greek word that Jesus used for "beautiful" is καλός ( kalos ), which is more usually translated "good.   It crops up all over the NT, but -- for me -- most significantly in John's Gospel, where Jesus calls himself the Good Shepherd; for the word means not only "good" and "beautiful", but also "good at the job".  And when Luke reports Jesus saying "Love your enemies, and do good to those who hate you", the good we are called to do isn't only "good (for them)" but also "beautiful".  In other words, if the woman did what she did for Jesus kalos , we're called to do likew...

Any number of my friends lately have been dealing existentially with the effects of what I call "the intellectual turn" in Christianity.  The intellectual turn  has to do with the intellectualizing of Christianity, and its correlative trouble dealing with doubt.  Intellectual  doubt is less about lament and the absence of God than it is about intellectual skepticism, having difficulty believing, epistemologically speaking, in the existence of God.  Such intellectual doubt has become particularly acute for them because that there's been a hollowing out of faith in many sectors of Christianity.   More specifically, for lots of folks, faith simply means belief .  Further, "belief" is taken to mean "I think proposition x is true".  Thus, having faith means something like "I believe God exists".  While atheists are defined as those who say "I don't believe that God exists".  Faith becomes reduced to asserting (or denying) propositi...