thought exercise on Seeking the Truth

In the novel The Second Coming one of Walker Percy’s characters says about Christians, “I cannot be sure they don’t have the truth. But if they have the truth, why is it the case that they are rep...

I once had the opportunity to speak briefly to a large Mormon audience at the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. I told them that I feel badly about the fact that we evangelicals often tell Mormons what th...

* This story is debated among Galileo scholars, though most would agree that the story conveys Galileo’s unique approach to learning. Galileo Galilei was a man who dared to look beyond what othe...

Sir Isaac Newton was one of the great scientists of all time. Most men of science today agree that his great book Principia is the greatest scientific book ever written. Yet of his achievemen...

What we need to realize, however, is that there is no such thing as autonomous or “self-grounding” knowledge. All systems of interpretation and all claims to true knowledge are ultimately grounded out...

Becoming a teachable person has two prerequisites: There must be a teacher and a person willing to be taught. Increasingly, Western culture has become an environment that celebrates and platforms the ...

During the infamous Dreyfus trial in France, Jewish army officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of treason, sparking a national scandal marked by anti-Semitism and injustice. Among Dreyfus...

In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...

The following prayer from the Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton, is vivid in its honesty and captures the challenge of seeking God’s will through a life of prayer: My Lord God, I have no idea where I a...

The most striking feature of the teaching of Jesus is that he was constantly talking about himself. It is true that he spoke much about the fatherhood of God and the kingdom of God. But then he added ...

The Enlightenment was, among many other things, a protest against a system that, since it was itself based on a protest [the Reformation], could not see that it was itself in need of further reform. (...

In June 2024, I (A. J.) had the opportunity to visit the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem, Oregon, to meet with a group of inmates who had read one of my recent books. The experience was...

Many of us presume that atheists and agnostics don’t think or care one bit for God. But this is not the case. Heinrich Böll, a German writer and devout Catholic, once joked, “I don’t like these atheis...

In his poem Cocktail Party , T. S. Eliot captures a fundamental truth about human nature and the source of much hurt in the world. People’s actions are rarely driven by outright malice—intended t...

St. Martin of Tours was a Frankish soldier in the Roman army who abandoned his military post to follow Jesus at a time when Christianity had only begun to take root in France. He later became the bish...

Author and Episcopal priest Stephanie Spellers suggests that instead of imagining a kingdom, a better way for us to understand what Jesus had in mind when he spoke of this script, this new way of livi...

We have an outdoor church readerboard (yep, manual, press-in-the-grooves-black-plastic-letters) near a busy street that I enjoy changing every couple of weeks. The challenge of saying something meanin...

Have you ever found yourself reading the Bible and you came across a scene that is horrific, filled with awful violence or scheming swindlers or ethical blunders, and you find yourself unsure what to ...

Martin Luther said that every Christian ought to read the Bible from cover to cover every year. But, likening the Bible to a forest, he also said that reading the Bible doesn’t become really enjoyable...

There is a story, which is fairly well known, about when the missionaries came to Africa. They had the Bible and we, the natives, had the land. They said “Let us pray,” and we dutifully shut our eyes....

The first language of the church in a deeply broken world is not strategy, but prayer. The journey of reconciliation is grounded in a call to see and encounter the rupture of this world so truthfully ...

As an amateur yet serious student of the American Civil War, I am constantly amazed at the sheer volume of material, which was preserved orally for half a century and longer, surrounding the key figur...

In her excellent little book (Mythical Me), Richella Parham describes the importance of looking on the past with grace: Developing a redemptive memory requires recalling not only the pain of the pas...

After the fall of apartheid in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu led his country in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC rejected the two extremes normally implemented after such...

In his June 1749 letter to Voltaire, the French Atheist Denis Diderot famously ruled that is is “very important not to mistake the hemlock for parsley; but to believe or not believe in God, is not imp...

I grew up near Washington D.C. surrounded by politics…I helped with the campaign of a friend’s father as he ran for state office, watched our friendly county supervisor become a US congressman, and le...

For years Kyle and I [Jamin Goggin] had no trouble looking critically upon others in their quest for power. We bemoaned the rock-star pastors who were in the spotlight, whose churches appeared to be m...

Last week, an atheist came up to me and asked how I could believe in a God who made parents eat their children.  Naturally, I was a little confused. A lot of people have odd ideas about God, but ...

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the ...

Power is present in almost all social situations we find ourselves in. Whether it be the corporation you work at, the village zoning committee, the street crew you work on, the neighborhood, the playg...