Unfulfilled Passion In two recent posts, Imagine a Boy, and Yearning, I embarked on a query about what love is, and what it might tell us about the big question: God, or purposeless, mechanistic randomness in the universe? These were posts in more of a story-telling format, than, say, analytic philosophy. Each has its place. […]
Read more...Author: Albert
Emancipation Day
Happy Emancipation Day. I heard on the radio that this holiday is the reason the due date for your taxes is extended. I thought that was the most ironic thing I’d every heard, so I checked to be sure it’s real, and it is. April 16th is apparently the anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, […]
Read more...Wester
Easter In last year’s Easter post I talked about the origin of that word, “Easter.” It is a reference to the direction, east, where the morning sun rises as a metaphor for the resurrection to come. In the early days of Christianity, new believers understood they were embracing the God of the Jews, and the […]
Read more...If No God
No Third Way People who reject religion think “religion is not true” but often don’t think about what is true if the idea of God is removed. To say idea X is false is just a negation of X. It’s not a statement of what idea is true in its place. Most (not all) people […]
Read more...Yearning
Love In Imagine a Boy, we considered the love between a father and son, illustrating how it stems at least from a feeling of unity; of oneness; something deeper than mere kinship. What the boy and his father desire is not mere proximity. Not merely comfortable companionship. Not just mutually entertaining company. Rather, they experience […]
Read more...Rough Water Baptism
Author Albert Norton Announces Release of Rough Water Baptism, Story of a Young Woman’s Awakening Set in San Francisco Bay Area Atlanta, GA — Literary fiction author Albert Norton announces the release of his second novel, Rough Water Baptism (ISBN 978-1-63213-268-0). The book can be found Amazon.com, the publisher’s site, electiopublishing.com, and the author’s site, albertnorton.com. […]
Read more...Elasticity
Living Abundantly Much of our self-imposed misery, disappointment, fear, and anxiety results from an inability or unwillingness to think rightly about the future. The Bible speaks to living “abundantly.” Could it be that the ability to think long-term, about this life but also the life to come, is the single best measure of living “abundantly?” […]
Read more...Imagine a Boy
Imagine a boy, 12, on a scout camping trip. He has a tendency to impatience and impetuousness, certainly not uncommon for a boy that age. As a result, he did a poor job setting up his tent, and now he’s cold, and wet. The conditions are miserable, but they’re nothing alongside the overwhelming pathos obsessively […]
Read more...Transcendence and Emergence
We’ve talked about transcendence a lot, including especially here and here. It is a top-down understanding of phenomena we observe, or consider through rational thought, that can’t be explained purely as matter in motion. The utility of a chair; the beauty of a painting; the harmony of music, are all emergent properties of the movement of […]
Read more...Youth Group Cringe
The Wise Kids is a 2011 film that for some reason is just now starting to gain traction. It’s probably a sleeper because it’s artsy and think-y. Probably also because the two-line blurb for the movie is, as usual with Netflix, remarkably inept. First Things contributor Eve Tushnet did a good write-up on the movie […]
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