Does God erase our sins from time itself?
Author: Michael Anthony
The Thing about Things
Maybe I’m making something out of nothing, but I am fascinating by the heavy lifting done today at least in English and German by the word “thing.” It’s not just that we overuse the word. What is really interesting is that we rely on it to produce a certain je ne sais quoi. When someone…
AI, Creativity, and Randomness
I always say that humans are not all that creative; even our most fantastical creations are nothing more than rehashes of things that we experience from the world around us. A unicorn is simply a horse with a horn attached to it. That being said, it should be noted that the faculty of creativity is…
The Novel I Will Never Finish
Every once in a great while I jot down pieces of a science fiction novel that, ostensibly, I will never be able to finish. Entitled Cellular, the book is a postmodern reflection on the problem of undifferentiation: the tendency for mimesis and society to reduce people to compartmentalized, isolated, and ultimately replaceable modules within the…
The Timeless Art of Demon Hunting
The present popularity of Netflix’s K-Pop Demon Hunters raises a vital question for concerned parents: What’s with all this demon hunting stuff anyway? The very mention of demons should give us pause, not because we don’t believe in them, but because there is a legitimate fear that we will cease to take them seriously. By…
Postmodern Meaning and Traffic Jams
I am often fascinated by the ebb and flow of traffic. Specifically, it’s amazing how often a heavy traffic jam simply ends without any visible cause in the vicinity. In most cases some accident or obstruction jammed the road and caused a slowdown which then grew as other cars responded. This slowdown then lasted for…
One Drop is an Ocean of Forgiveness [2]
The gratuity of the “one drop” dictum was deeply undermined within Protestant thought in a fascinating and telling manner.
One Drop is an Ocean of Forgiveness [1]
“Even one drop of the most precious blood would suffice for the redemption of the world”
Predatory Predication?
Whitehead and others have argued that traditional metaphysics fails precisely because of its obsession with language. Since it assumes the subject-verb-object mold of language, so also does it conform philosophical thought to this same mold. The attempt by Heidegger and others to escape into the poetry of the pre-Socratics is another essay at escape from…
Leibniz Raised the Bar
When Leibniz coined the term theodicy, he also effectively inaugurated a fundamental shift in the way in which this fundamental question is prosecuted.
On Behalf of the Old
OK, so older English sometimes gives us pause. What in the world does Holden Caulfield mean by this? Women kill me. They really do. I don’t mean I’m oversexed or anything like that—although I am quite sexy. I just like them, I mean. They’re always leaving their goddam bags out in the middle of the…
Mass Reflection: People of the Future
There is something terrifying about the future. We are afraid of the unknown, and what is less known that what has yet to even be? Nevertheless, the divine command comes to us precisely as the will of the future.
Falling To Pieces Into Place
Paramore’s early “Hallelujah” has an interesting lyric at the start: Somehow everything’s going to fall—right in-to place The pause after “fall” and the lengthening of “right” add to the meaning of the line. It’s a little like: Somehow everything’s going to fall—[and if that’s the case then] let it in-to place The falling of world…
The End Reveals the Beginning
For me, a central point of apocalyptic theology is that the end reveals the beginning and the beginning reveals the end. On the one side, as the history of the world progresses toward its end, the real meaning of the beginning becomes apparent—even to the point of becoming obnoxiously obvious. Specifically, the more that the…
The Weaning of Plotinus
If you pick up the biography that the third-century Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry wrote about his teacher Plotinus, you may be struck by just how slight it is on actual facts and details. It’s less a biography and more a few personal notes.Porphyry explains that because Plotinus despised his own bodily existence–true to his philosophy–he was…
Spooky Theology at a Distance
The misuse of scientific concepts within theology causes me exceptional annoyance. After all, before I suddenly switched to theology, I had intended to pursue a doctorate in physics. To be clear, this unfulfilled aspiration does not provide me with any noteworthy credentials. I cannot pretend to have the scientific expertise of, for example, the man…
Darwin’s Bad Habits
My latest amusing find is from the autobiography of Charles Darwin. Often delightful in its candor, the book recounts how the young Darwin had plenty of bad habits related to his predilection for collection and cataloguing. He wasted massive stretches of time shooting birds and tracking his kills, so much so that his father sent…
Know Your Pagans
Ancient pagans had no shortage of gods. In the first century, Varro categorized the Roman gods into three groups: the “certain,” the “uncertain,” and the “chosen.” The latter were the gods more specifically worshipped by Roman tradition. Yet Augustine mocks Varro’s categories with the fact that many of these so-called “chosen” gods performed such trifling…
The Depths of Time
An insightful essay by Joe D. Burchfield entitled “The Age of the Earth and the Invention of Geological Time” discusses the concepts of “geological time” and “deep time”, tracing their usage back to the influential work of Charles Lyell at the start of the nineteenth century. “Geological time” occurs frequently in works having to do…
Racism and Population Control
I’ve recently been reading Thomas Malthus’s 1798 first edition of The Principle of Population because of its significance for Charles Darwin, which I mention in my draft book on evolutionary theology, Evolution and Grace. Darwin was reluctant at first to apply natural selection to humans, but in fact it was Malthus’s teaching in regard to…
Tech Tuesday: Goldwave
So, you have to record a lecture, make it as clear as possible, and cut out that bit where you lost your train of thought and started rambling about typos in your lecture notes. What do you do? Well, you just pull up a voice recorder app on your phone… Or not. All of the…
Mass Reflection: Severing the Head
The hero or saint, rather than serving as a guide and a model for imitation, easily becomes a kind of idol.
Tech Tuesday: Mario Teaches Typing
Even with all of the new apps for children these days, there’s very few that are actually very helpful or truly educational. Watching cartoon animals in between Candy Crush ads does not really constitute education. Older kids can learn from a variety of games, especially complex simulation games, but younger kids really don’t have much…
The myth of the “Dark Ages”
Even the best storycrafter shapes a tale after his or her own likeness, and yet, stories have a way of getting away from us and shaping us in return. The most powerful of these stories become cultural myths, broad-sweeping metanarratives that reinterpret reality through a particular lens. Such myths may point to a deeper truth, but…
Tech Tuesday: Catholics & Cultures
They say that when you sing, you pray twice. I say when you show students a video, you teach twice—sometimes for half the work. Of course it has to be a good video, and those can be hard to find. Nevertheless, I recently found an excellent online resource loaded with good videos. It is called…
Top 5 money-saving DIY jobs
I recently perused an article on “The 25 things you should learn to DIY this year,” and it struck me that many of the ideas were not all that practical. For most homeowners—especially those of us with stereotypically large Catholic families—practicality and savings should be a big consideration when deciding what to do by yourself. If…
Tech Tuesday: Math Practice Generator
I loved math as a kid, but thanks to my wife’s diligent homeschooling, my kids are way ahead of where I was. I didn’t start learning the multiplication tables until I was 9; my 7-year-old already knows multiplication and division by heart. This success has a lot to do with a great program called Math…
How To: Fix a hanging closet door
As a result of poor care by the previous occupants of our house, several of our closets have suspended doors that continually fall off of the track. You merely touch the door to open it and it plops down and refuses to move. Typically, for a short-term fix I have to get into the closet,…
Kids = constant entertainment
We parents usually have plenty of funny stories about the things kids say. Many of my favorites come from my very imaginative second child, Lucía (age 5), sometimes in concert with my oldest, Grace (age 7). Once when I was reading a bedtime story, two-year-old Lucía, exclaimed, “I want to whee-haa!” Before I could ask…
How To: Slicing pages in an uncut book
I recently hit the jackpot in terms of book ownership. A nearby religious community was purging their entire library, and I managed to pick up nearly 400 volumes of mostly rare and classic theology and philosophy books. I picked up plenty from Ratzinger, Rahner, and Newman, as well as possibly the complete works of Fulton…