God scoffs at religious superiority; he wants his people to love him and their neighbors. When a Muslim or a Buddhist or an atheist suspicious of or even antagonistic to the Church lives out a better example of Christ’s life than a Christian does, the Christian is freed to recognize the face of Jesus Christ along with Jacob and admit in wonder that “I have seen your face like seeing the face of God."
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Bob Dylan at 80: The Ship Never Came In … And That’s OK
On October 26th, 1963, Bob Dylan performed “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” for the first time in New York’s Carnegie Hall. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” were also in the set. And he closed with “When the Ship Comes In,” a song he had performed with Joan Baez only a few months earlier at the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. would later deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech. Something was happening and Dylan was right in the midst of it.
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‘Hamlet’ as Lenten Fare
It has been a hard winter in lots of ways, and my spiritual life is not immune to the toll the virus took. That said, one upside of the interruption is that I have made an unlikely substitution for what would have been conventional devotional reading in a more typical year: Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
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Concerning Humility
When I was eight, I saw the photo of Muhammad Ali delivering the knockout to Sonny Liston. I was awestruck. The next Saturday, when I was lucky enough to win my little league wrestling match, I tried to replicate Ali’s pose. My parents called me up to the bleachers and I received an early lesson in humility.
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How Karl Marx Saved My Christmas
I was combing through Barbies, Lego sets, and the latest versions of Monopoly in search of something to give my two-year old for Christmas. Nothing particularly excited me, and there was nothing I could think of that he actually needed. My limited parenting experience told me he would get more entertainment out of the box and wrapping paper than the actual item anyway. But it seemed bad form simply not to buy my child a Christmas gift. So there I stood.
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Zombies on Your Mind?
Just what is consciousness and how does it work? What does it mean that I am aware? That I am aware of myself? Does it arise entirely from the brain? Is it a function of a soul? Are other animals conscious? How would we know? Does individual consciousness survive beyond death? And what about ... zombies?
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Neither Modern nor Post-Modern: Newman on Certitude
Our reasoning might be user-relative, but truth is not itself relative. Our path to truth is only as subjects who seek it out from particular perspectives, but we must reject what C. S. Lewis later called “the poison of subjectivism” which posits that there are only perspectives and no full picture to which those perspectives attach.
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Scripture’s Knowing: A Companion to Biblical Epistemology (Book Recommendation)
That rituals are not expressions of our belief systems; rather they themselves are a way to think—a way to know, is one of Johnson’s core insights. Practicing rituals, Johnson thinks, is “embodied knowing” at its finest.
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Drawing or Color, Part IV: The Philosophers Weigh In
Over the past several months, Veritas Journal has featured several quick takes on the long-running debate between line and color in the history of western art. Imagine for a moment if we could transpose this debate into another key ... What might modern philosophers have to say on the question?
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By an Unexpected Way
There are a lot of people who would like to do something beautiful for God, but they have no idea where to start ... they are hungry to draw close to God and they want to do something with him, but they don't know how. I'm hoping people will read these stories and realize they don't need to know how!
