When the Bible Became a Musical

As a rule, I don’t like musicals. Well, it’s not “as” a rule. It is a rule. I do not like musicals. I never watched Glee, unless the women at my house were monopolizing the television. I walked out of The Sound of Music; something about Maria racing to the top of a hill singing with no hint of asthmatic reaction ruined it for me. I did stay through Les Misérables, though dying people singing tend to annoy me, but it was operatic and no one was asking me to believe that perfectly ordinary people frequently burst into spur-of-the-moment song. I never break into spontaneous song, not if someone might be listening. Why should anyone else? Continue Reading »

Can Reason Withstand the Death of God?

Freddie has written a post that forces me into the odd position of defending Sam Harris; the crux of which is the claim that once we accept the human mind as being a contingent accident of evolution, we necessarily must abandon any faith in the intellectual edifices constructed by such minds: For . . . . Continue Reading »

Science, Faith, and the Limits of Reason

    "At the time and in the country in which the present study was written, it was granted by everyone except backward people that the Jewish faith had not been refuted by science or by history . . . . [O]ne could grant to science and history everything they seem to teach . . . . Continue Reading »

The Church's Way of Speaking

When St. Augustine abandoned the teaching of rhetoric in Milan to enroll for baptism, he asked St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, what to read in the Scriptures “to make me readier and fitter to receive so great a grace”? Ambrose told him to read the prophet Isaiah. Augustine took his advice, . . . . Continue Reading »