Monthly Archives: May 2018

New fashions in exculpation

  When fashion writers comment on the new styles of the new season, then don’t stop to call their readers’ attention to the fact that all these people have chosen to wear clothes.  They take that for granted and so … Continue reading

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Peers and Um-peers

“Peer” is the English language version of the Latin par, which means “equal.” [1]“Umpire” just means “not a peer.” English borrowed nompere from the French but over time “a noumpere” became “an oumpere”—a process I learned just today is called … Continue reading

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The Episcopal Ghost from Hell

I have been a fan of C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce for a long time. I have appreciated it the way a reader of fiction appreciates, and since I have taught courses using it as a text, I have … Continue reading

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Final Rest

It took me roughly a year to decide to get a tattoo. It took something like 5—7 minutes to actually get the tattoo. Here it is. I am amazed, as I look back at this simple process, to think that … Continue reading

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Pentecost, 2018

I’ve had the basics of an essay of Pentecost in mind for awhile now. And next Sunday is it, so I am going to try to pull a set of analogies together for you. These analogies are emotional access points … Continue reading

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All-wheel Drive

As I get older, I think of all-wheel drive (AWD) as increasingly important to me. [1] And I’m not thinking about driving. I am thinking about how best to live my life. When I wrote about this before, I imagined … Continue reading

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Karl Barth and Ergophobia

I want to think today about ergophobia. [1] I mean by this term not the familiar “fear of work,” (illustrated by the man hiding under the desk, below) but more a “fear of works righteousness.” The mainstay of Christian theology … Continue reading

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The Zipper

One of the lines for which Thomas Hobbes is justly famous is that life without a strong central government (Leviathan, he said) is “solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short.”  [1] What he meant is that one of government’s prized functions … Continue reading

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