Truthiness, post-fact, and BS have all become jargon terms in political communication. I’m not sure any of us expected that from the new millennium seventeen years ago. But then we lived through presidential perjury (Clinton), yellowcake uranium (Powell), and an entire decade of popular distrust for the state. We haven’t recovered. That brings me to […]
Read with Spectrum: Volf’s Flourishing
Adventist Forum’s Spectrum Magazine is hosting a summer reading group again this year. Last year, we read Richard Beck’s reflections on morality, purity, and disgust in the book Unclean. Read my article on the body and the private sphere. This year, we turn to Miroslav Volf’s latest work, Flourishing: Why we need religion in a globalized world. […]
Worlds Apart: The Incommensurability Problem
When I was about 7 years old, my brother had a series of children’s songs on cassette tape. One of the songs included this chorus: Danke schön, mein Herr! Danke schön, danke schön! Thank you, my King— For life is so wunderschön! The problem? I didn’t yet speak German. So what I heard instead was […]
On Understanding
Convenience of conceptual analogies is no substitute for usefulness or rigour. —R. Brennan & S. Henneberg One understands a phenomenon only when one has a holistic view of [it], a view that integrates all of its known components and all of its known manifestations. —T. Bouldin & L. Odell Pulling a mechanical thing apart to […]
Awe, Doubt, Fanaticism
The Doubt Essential to Faith | Lesley Hazleton Abolish all doubt, and what’s left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction.You’re certain that you possess the Truth—inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T—and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism… […]
An End or a Metamorphosis?
Is our current collective path sustainable? Or is it not? If we did nothing different for the next 1,000 years, what would happen to us? It is not inevitable that we should fail. —Terence McKenna McKenna also asks: “Is there cause for optimism?” What do you think?
