What does suffering mean? What sort of universe is it that allows the suffering of a good person like Job? Are we better off just abandoning the whole idea of a good God?
Category: Philosophy
What is freedom? Is it browsing down an eternal supermarket aisle searching for breakfast cereal? Or is it more like being a tree growing into full tree-ish-ness beside a river?
What is the Good Life? Is it the firm thunk sound your Mercedes’ door makes as you shake your impeccably coiffed hair and drive off into a beautiful future? And what does the Good Life have to do with being of the mind of Christ?
What does a legend about a late-medieval Mughal Emperor have to tell us about how (and why) to be a religious person in our complex context? And what does it have to do with Mount Fuji?
Part one of a series.
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What do you want?
Jesus asked James and John: “What do you want me to do for you?”
It’s a hard question – As the psychologist Abraham Maslow said: “It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”
This blog post is part of a series (starting here) exploring what Charles Taylor can teach us about how faith and secularity interact in his (enormous) work A Secular Age. One of Taylor’s main points seems to be that there is a big story in our culture that Science inevitably replaces Faith. Matthew Arnold’s poem On […]
The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world Matthew Arnold On Dover Beach […]
I’ve been very preoccupied by my CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) unit these last few months, which has put paid to my desire to blog. However, at college this week we did a sequence on public theology. This is what I had to say. Life, said the Buddha, is difficult. This seems like a very basic […]
I was recently blown away by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty. From the huge, decadent party in the opening scenes during which Jep Gambarella, writer and aging roué, is revealed grinning mischieviously at the camera, king of the high life, through the crisis caused by the discovery that the only woman he ever […]
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On Doubt
What is doubt? What are its good and bad points? Why is it such a big issue in faith circles anyway? There is so much to say that it is really hard to know where to start. However, I was a philosophy student first, so it is most natural for me to start there, with […]
Alister Pate 