Religion

There is a universal distinction in Indo-European languages between knowing about a fact and knowing personally, between

1 wissen (saber Spanish, savoir French, scire Latin) and

2 kennen (conocer, connaître, cognoscere).

“Science” from scire “to know” is analytic. The root meaning of “science” is to “cut up,” so it is about knowledge by analysis, not synthesis. In fact the word “shit” in English comes from that same root, because excrement is “cut off” from the body.

Enlightenment rationalists used experiment and reason, both of them in an impersonal non-commital sort of way, being suspicious of the mystical– divorcing as it were “experiment” from “experience.” They had important axioms: Truth should be able to be interpersonally verified, and the universe is knowable because God is good and wouldn’t deceive our senses and reason. But truth without Truth led to deism and onward down to atheism.

“I cut open the body and I can’t find the soul.”

“Did it ever occur to you that the very cutting destroyed the soul?”

Micah Tillman reminded me again of this distinction in his blog today, where he comments on the familiar fact that pisteuo in Koine Greek means both faith and faithfulness.

1. faith, of the mind, analytic, held at arm’s length intellectually;

2. faithfulness, of the deeds, synthetic, embraced personally. “Cognoscere” is to about “personal knowledge,” to use Michael Polanyi’s term, and personal commitment.

Contrast Jesus before Pilate:

1 truth, academic, according to Pilate;

2. Jesus the Truth, personal.

Hear C. S. Lewis in his essay “Is Theology Poetry?” in Weight of Glory: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen:”

1. “not only because I see it” (analysis and experimental observation), but

2. “because by it I see everything else” (commitment).

Michael Ward has a great new book, Planet Narnia, about C. S. Lewis’s childrens’ stories. (A great review by N. T. Wright is here. ) In Planet Narnia Ward tells us that C. S. Lewis distinguished between

1. looking at a beam of light; and

2. looking along a beam of light.

(The C. S. Lewis quote is here in context.) Don’t just analyze the light; allow the light to serve its telos.

I was already prompted to think about this over the past weekend even before Micah’s blog entry. My first prompt was reading a fresh accurate translation of Exodus 20:3Exodus 20:3
English: World English Bible - WEB
3?You shall have no other gods before me.

“Thou shalt have no other gods between your face and Mine.”

The Hebrew for “before me” also means “in my face.” The traditional translation imagines (analytically) gods lined up along a line. Elohim is first; all the others rank distant seconds. This new more personalistic translation (thank you Thom Gardner) suggests that even in the Ten Words, God intended personal relationship not just legalistic obedience.

My second prompt was yesterday while I was listening to the Easter sermon at my church–a sermon on Romans 10:9Romans 10:9
English: World English Bible - WEB
9?that if you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

1 believe in your heart that Jesus resurrected (faith), and

2 confess with your mouth (faithfulness).

In my Ph.D. dissertation in 1979, I reviewed the artificial intelligence (AI) literature to find out how proponents of “strong AI” would ever bridge the gap between “knowing about” and “knowing personally.” The best that they could come up with– the best that they still can come up with 30 years later–is that personal knowledge is “precompiled” knowledge. But precompiling “X causes Y to die” into “X kills Y” does not bootstrap us nearly far enough up the “information pyramid” from mere data to wisdom:

As St. Agustine says, “believe that you may know.”

Get Wisdom. You can only get it by personally being committed to Him, for Wisdom is a person, not a proposition.

Here are three stories about the faith development of my grandsons, Anderson, 2, and Josiah, just now 4.

In March, Anderson and Prisca–his mom–visited his great-grandparents. Anderson was named after his great-grandmother, the former Eleanor Anderson. We call her “Grandy.” On Grandy’s wall is a crucifix made of palm leaves. Because it’s rather abstract, Anderson can be forgiven for not having figured out what it represents. He asked Grandy. She said it pictures Jesus on the cross with his arms outstretched.

Anderson, who knows more about baseball than he does about Jesus, said, “Safe!”

Anderson expressed perfectly the meaning of the cross …

… even if the metaphor itself doesn’t work perfectly, since Jesus is the Runner not the Umpire. Still, I will never again look at a cross without being thankful that I am “safe!” at home.

—–

In church, Josiah learned that God is everywhere. So when he got outside the building, he shouted into the sky at the top of his voice, “Hi, God!” Prisca pointed out that because God is everywhere, He’s not only in the sky, but in us as well, so that we can talk to God quietly, too. Josiah must have understood, because on several occasions during the following week Josiah was heard to whisper quietly, “Hi, God.”

—–

While Anderson was visiting Grandy, Josiah was visiting us. On his first morning, I asked Josiah how his sleep was. He said, “I had a dream about Jesus and God. I love them.”

On another day I caught him singing the words to the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” I asked him how he knew the words. After all, some of them are big words: “griefs,” “privilege,” and “forfeit” to name just three. Josiah replied, “One of Anderson’s books has the song.”

—–

Psalm 8:2Psalm 8:2
English: World English Bible - WEB
2?From the lips of babes and infants you have established strength, Because of your adversaries, that you might silence the enemy and the avenger.

toddlers shout the songs
That silence atheist babble.

We are safe. God is near. And I love Him. What more do I need to know?

And so I whisper, “Hi, God!”

My niece’s husband Dan Masshardt inspired me to prepare this entry. He listed the above themes as separate topics and created them as timeless lists of talking points. It fits my style better to have a chronological arrangement and not to separate the two themes, since the reasons came to me in a clear order, but it has never been clear to me how to disentangle the two themes. I also couldn’t separate my very personal reasons from general theological speaking.

The list is cumulative. For example, those earliest stirrings of sin, love, beauty, and answered prayers continue unabated to this day. Besides those reasons, the Bible spoke to me as a unique book and the logic of the Christian worldview grounded me by the time that I finished college.

1. Elementary school
a. Sin. I was all too painfully aware that I was a thief and nosy, although I had “good reasons”—my family was poor and I was insecure about who I was. But my conscience worked, so I knew that I was doing wrong things. I wanted to stop, but I didn’t know how.

b. Love. Alice Huntington, my second and third grade teacher, and to a lesser extent Elizabeth Terry, my Sunday School teacher, showed me love which I did not get at home. They claimed that it came from God through Christ. I had no reason to disbelieve them.

c. Beauty. Alternate yellow and red tulips every Spring filled with beauty the hexagonal star in the center of the traffic circle in front of my apartment. The sleek lines of the 1956 red and white twotone Chevy Impala, were a graceful contrast with our black family clunker. A black and orange Monarch butterfly emerged from its jeweled green chrysalis. The Dona Diana Overture captivated me. (It was the theme song for the radio program Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. We get our beauty where we can.) These are just a few of the beautiful things that caught my attention as a young boy.

d. Answered prayer. Two of my big prayers were answered in elementary school. In 1954, I prayed to become a Christian, sensing a need to be forgiven and a need for love. I was flooded with a deep sense of a permanent relationship to God. Second, I prayed that my mother would be able to live away from the mental hospital where she was locked up for seven years. That happened in 1957. Two smaller prayers were answered as well, when I was near death breaking through the ice into a deep pond and when I was near death being rushed to the hospital with a burst appendix.

2. Junior high school
a. Sin. Add to the above sins indulging in sexual sin. My guilt increased by the fact that it more clearly involved others and by the fact that I sensed how much it displeased Jesus, Who was now without a doubt living in my heart.

b. Love. As I got to know my relatives, I saw a stark contrast between those on the one hand like my grandmother Emma Chase, and my aunts Flo Cavanaro, Florence Glidewell, and Ruth Finch —who were Christians—, and those on the other hand like Marjory Bacorn, George Cavanaro, Carl Chase, and Dad who were not.
     I grant you that there were exceptions. My neighbor Alice Jeneski did not seem to profess to be a Christian but she loved me; Uncle Art did profess to be a Christian but he had a bad temper anyway.

c. Beauty. I consumed every mathematics book that I could find, whether from libraries, from Christmas gifts that I asked for, or from my small allowance. Parabolas were beautiful; algebra was beautiful. I bought One, Two, Three, … Infinity by George Gamow, and read it at least five times.

d. Bible. For me in elementary school, the Bible was a book of heroism—of David, Gideon, Deborah, and Sampson. I did memorize Psalms 23 and 100 then. But thanks to Wednesday afternoon Bible memory work at church offered during “release time” from public school, I began to memorize a lot of verses of the Bible. I began to see the Bible’s themes. The Bible was like “fire in my bones” (Jeremiah 20:9Jeremiah 20:9
English: World English Bible - WEB
9?If I say, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name, then there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with forbearing, and I can?t contain.

3. High school
a. Love. Rita Youngs, my high school youth group leader, showed me love, both directly to me, and to many foster kids she raised.

b. Beauty. High school teachers exposed me to the beauty of literature and of language. Although I messed around with a chemistry set since sixth grade, a high school science teacher showed me the beauty of Chemistry. Aunt Ruth’s gift of National Geographic Magazine showed me the beauty of far-off places. The book God’s, Graves, and Scholars showed me the beauty of far-off times. The Rev. Bill Blackwood’s Sunday School class on systematic theology that used George Pardington’s Outline Studies of Christian Doctrine showed me the logical beauty of the Christian faith.

c. Bible. Two summer camps continued my Bible memory, deepening my sense that this was no mere collection of human writings.

d. Prayer. It was in high school that I learned to “pray without ceasing.” Unanswered prayer didn’t bother me very much, because I was grounded in prayer as a relationship instead of prayer as a slot machine. I did pray that Dad would become a Christian and that I would be able to stay sexually pure. Neither of those happened fast. The first answer waited for six decades; the second answer, for one decade.

4. College
a. Love. Pastor George & Gladys Decker treated me like their third son.

b. Logic. I read C. S. Lewis’s defense of Christianity in Mere Christianity, and a defense of Jesus’ resurrection by Frank Morrison in Who Moved the Stone? Since I wasn’t argued into the Kingdom, it’s not likely that I’ll be argued out. I did not see apologetics as a weapon, but as a thing of beauty. The logic of my faith was like the logic of Mathematics—a powerful, coherent story.

c. Answered prayer. I saw the lives of others changed as I prayed that they too would discover the joy of following Jesus: for example, Rick Lueth, Tommy Wandless, Anne Macomber and her brother David.

c. Beauty. Before college I was exposed to Protestant hymns on piano, polkas on accordion, and country music on guitar. For some reason, the classical music taught in my public school didn’t “get to me”; like poetry, it was dry as a mere object of study. But at MIT, Bach concerts on the Kresge Auditorium organ were intensely emotional experiences for me.
     In college I discovered the beauty of worship itself—through Lutheran vespers in the chapel on Wednesday nights, and through Anglo-Catholic services around Christmas and Easter at a nearby church.
     You might see my appreciating Bach as merely becoming cultured, but both Bach and formal liturgy increased my faith by keeping it from becoming mere sterile logic. My faith continues to be emotional as well as logical. That is why I answer the title questions with my story rather than with propositions. The man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument, I reasoned.

5. After college
I now draw on revelation, on reason, on tradition, and on experience to ground my faith, aware that no one of them by itself is without its challenges. For me one test of a faith that conforms to reality is this: Is it simple enough that a child can have it, but profound enough to engage the wisest of adults? Jesus said both about faith in Him.
     Where does a sense of sin, of love, and of beauty come from? I reasoned with the faith of a child that they came from the same place where answered prayers come from. Now as an adult I do not see how atheism adequately accounts for even one of those themes.

American literary figure David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement address in 2005 said–and I concur–”Everybody worships.” One cannot read his speech without thinking that he had life almost figured out. Yet he committed suicide. The London Times said that he had friends. I wonder if any of them told him that he should follow his own advice and worship Jesus or YHWH.

Here’s an excerpt:

[I]n the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Who or what do you worship?

In late May, I started a discussion with my kids and a few others about politics. By July 23, the scales tipped for me in favor of McCain. I waited until today to say whom I would vote for to see if anything would happen to change my mind. Each section is headed with the party which in summary I support on that section. I do not regard the sections as equally important, but to weigh them is another hard discussion.

• Energy: Republican

  The Republican consensus seems to be to move slowly on clamping down on energy use, relying on free-market forces to bring some sense to the energy crisis. The Democratic consensus seems to be to clamp down hard and soon, as for example by increasing the Federal gasoline tax. McCain even spoke of temporarily lifting the Federal gasoline tax to provide some relief for low-income taxpayers. That goes too far. The US economy is like an incompressible fluid. One can push it down here only to have it shoot up there. Since the consequences of a much higher Federal gasoline tax (to be spent on infrastructure improvements, of course!) can’t be known, I prefer slower clamping down on usage, agreeing with Republicans.

  As you can see, I have made a common Republican mistake in this analysis. I have treated the US in isolation. In fact, it is the global demand for energy, including and especially countries emerging from the Third World like China and India, which are pushing that incompressible fluid of a global market. They should be a part of my model. I don’t think global demand is a part of either the Republican or Democratic model, though. (To be fair, Obama did say something about discussing the global economy with China.) Typically the Republican view is nationalistic and the Democratic view is internationalistic (or as the radio preachers rant, “one world government”).

  Energy demand is inelastic: I have to drive to work; I have to heat my house. So clamping down on usage as Democrats recommend might destabilize the economy more than allowing free-market forces to work.

  (I wrote this section before it was clear to everyone that misuse of credit is the prime destabilizer of today’s world-wide economy. This misuse was pushed by a largely Democratic view that everyone should be in a home of their own and by a Republican view that the market will be self-correcting without Federal regulation. We see clearly now that both views are wrong. See Economics below.)

  I like our US Federal system, in which states become laboratories for experimentation. We should investigate the effects of Democratic and Republican policies respectively at the state level. Car emission controls, for example, were first tried in California with success, and now we have them nationwide. I’m suspicious of Federal-level solutions first about energy. That makes me a states-rights Republican on energy issues, as on many other issues.

• Universal health care: Democratic

  I have changed my mind in the past few years on universal health care, from Republican (opposed to it), to Democratic, in favor of it. (Think about Hillary Clinton’s proposal when she was President her husband was President.) Using Pennsylvania as a laboratory, I see that universal health care for children aged 18 and under has gone well, both in terms of percentage enrolled and in terms of manageable economic impact. It’s possible to paint too rosy a picture of universal health care, as Michael Moore does in his film Sicko. But Moore says that Obama changed his mind from being in favor of “single payer universal health care” to being non-committal about it. All candidates change their minds as they move toward the center to capture uncommitted voters. In the current campaign, the Democratic-leaning New York Times editorializes about Obama doing that, as does the London Times. (h/t Micah Tillman for these references)

  I think that the US is ready to extend the Pennsylvania model of health care up to age 18 to the whole country as a first step in universal health care. The Democratic position seems more ready to tackle this, despite some waffling. The dissension that I hear about this is that it continues to allow private insurers to skim the healthiest segment of the population (ages 19-64) while the Federal government pays for the least healthy newborns and old folks. So a single payer universal health care for all ages would be cheaper per capita in the long run. I would be suspicious of the single payer being the Federal government were it not for the fact that the Medicare infrastructure is already in place. That makes me Democratic on this issue. I assure you that this has nothing to do with the fact that my Medicare coverage begins 3 days before the November 4 election! I changed my mind after hearing my philosophy professor colleague Tim Schoettle speak convincingly on the subject several years ago.

• Economic health: Republican

  Beyond energy and health care economic issues are other issues. I include here also whether we should bail out mortgage lenders who took foolish risks, how we can shore up the US dollar against foreign currencies, and whether tax cuts will help the economy. Since Obama has been changing his mind about these things too to become more like a Republican, I am giving this to McCain.

  (I wrote that paragraph before the recent economic collapse. Now three months later both candidates are looking more and more alike. McCain and George Bush are both behaving more like Democrats, which I think is a good move. However, I still oppose Obama’s plan for income redistribution. Listen to his own words about that in this audio clip (with a little video clip at its end).

• Net neutrality: Democratic

  Only geeks like me may care now, but if we lose net neutrality, everyone will care. The Democratic position is to favor net neutrality. This is ironic for Democrats, because it’s the laissez-faire viewpoint, viz. “Don’t regulate the internet!” McCain hasn’t really said much about it. I’m a Democrat here. There wouldn’t be an internet if it weren’t for the Federal government’s sponsoring the original DARPA as a national defense matter. In the same way, there wouldn’t be an interstate highway system or the US highway system if it weren’t for Federal funding for these projects in the interest of national defense. Some things require Federal participation. Which leads me to …

• Foreign affairs: Tie

  Obama is less experienced than McCain on foreign policy. But leadership depends heavily on those whom one listens to as advisors, and both candidates wisely do not say much about whom they will listen to as advisors. Leadership also depends heavily on stage presence, and Obama has more of that than McCain. Obama won a “global confidence” poll among several nations. This is either comforting or scary depending on whether you regard those governments as the kind you’d want to have supporting your views. Take this CNN video clip for example. McCain makes decisions rapidly. This is either comforting or scary depending on whether you praise his resolve or condemn his lack of deliberation. McCain’s Iraq policy, with its slower withdrawl timetable than Obama’s is a contrary example to rapid decision-making. Regarding foreign affairs, then, so far it’s a tie for me.

• Abortion: Republican

  McCain is pro-life; Obama is pro-choice. I’m pro-life.

• Supreme Court Judicial Appointments: Republican

  Since Republicans tend to be strict constructionist as I am, and Democrats tend to reinterpret the Constitution, even though the candidates haven’t been as clear as I’d like about Constitutional issues, I’m betting on the Republican party’s long-standing position.

• Gay Marriage: Republican

  As a consistent Federalist, I should say, “Let’s try gay marriage in a state, say Massachusetts, and see what happens.” Hey, we did! It has been oppressive in terms of respect for conservative Christians. For one example, a Roman Catholic adoption agency was not legally able to place children only in the families heterosexually married couples, according to their sincerely held religious beliefs. So they closed their doors after 100+ years.

  For a second example, parents cannot receive notification of when their kindergarten children will be taught about homosexuality in Lexington, MA, schools. This dated link does not address the very recent US Supreme Court’s refusal to grant a writ of certiorari to hear the case arising out of that, citing as its basis that Massachusetts law stands.

  For a third example, there is now pressure (Skip to the section headed “Restrooms.”) to assign people to public restrooms based on their self-perceived gender, since gay rights advocates include transgender rights as a next goal. Those are some of the not-so-good things that have happened.

  My son-in-law suggests (link broken) that we might “give others the grace to make the right decision for themselves, even when their choices are wrong and destructive.” By that logic, then Pennsylvania is right in having legalized slot machines, with some of the winnings being set aside for the “destructive” effects of same, just as the Federal government legalizes smoking, and then gives tobacco profits to states to spend on programs to reverse the destructive effects of smoking.

  I believe that there are good secular arguments against consensual homosexual sex relating to public health, just as there are good secular arguments against gambling, smoking, and obesity (just to throw in a much more pervasive health issue). So my vote related to gay marriage is Republican, although I would object if government told me that I eat too many cashews! (See my blog entry citing the liberal theme, “keep your hands off my body.”)

• Other issues

  I’ve avoided mentioning things about which I have not yet formed an opinion, such as embryonic stem cell research, global warming, resuming space travel, or fixing the nation’s aging infrastructure. I’ve avoided explaining why I think that Palin was a bad choice for McCain’s running mate. This post is already too long. But I wanted to get something up before November 4. Even if you disagree with me, vote!

Jonathan Haidt gave an incredible talk for TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) in March entitled “The Moral Mind.” It’s about five foundations for morality necessary to make society work, rooted in our innate genetic makeup, gathered by Haidt and his colleagues from many places, including their web site.

Haidt is a liberal caught on the horns of a dilemma.  Here are the five foundations of morality that he and his colleagues identify in their research:

1. harm/care
2. fairness/reciprocity
3. ingroup/loyalty
4. authority/respect
5. purity/sanctity

Haidt points out that the last three are conservative values.  Liberals propose that we “celebrate diversity” contra 3, propose that we “question authority” contra 4, and propose that we “keep your laws off my body” contra 5.  The intellectually honest thing to do upon discovering these findings about the foundations of morality would be to champion the benefits of conservatism.

Haidt concludes instead that we rise above the liberal-conservative divide, beyond “us and them,” beyond “right and wrong,” even beyond “true and false.”  These sound like an oriental world view beyond all dichotomies, but they also sound strangely like the big tent of liberalism in contrast to the very foundation of values that Haidt’s research identifies as essential to a well-functioning society.

Noam Chomsky of MIT (political über-liberal as well as a world-class linguist) faced a similar problem.  He originally believed in a Lockean blank slate mind, but the more he studied children’s language acquisition, the more he rejected that in favor of his “innateness hypothesis.”

To say that language or morality is innate is not to say that it is God-given, but you shouldn’t miss Haidt’s use of the word “miracle” in describing the moral mind.  Haidt says that evolution led to this genetic situation.  Which is to say, Haidt has no idea what led to this genetic situation.

I applaud Haidt’s call to reject self-righteousness, which is a common failing of conservatives like me.  I also applaud Haidt’s providing another example of the self-defeating nature of liberalism, apparently unintended.

Florida State University offers a nice animation of
“Powers of Ten,” a variation of the animated film that Charles and Ray Eames made in conjunction with their
book Powers of Ten.

There we find our place evenly distant between quasars and quarks–between the gigantic and the minute. (At least logarithmically, which is the point of the book’s title.)

My pastor’s sermon this morning was on Psalm 90:12Psalm 90:12
English: World English Bible - WEB
12?So teach us to number our days, That we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Psalm 8 puts humans in the middle too. “What is man that Thou art mindful of him? … Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels. Thou hast crowned him with glory and honor. … Thou made him to have dominion over … the beasts.” We are neither angel nor animal.

I think about being in the middle a lot. My September alumni magazine, Technology Review, had two article that reminded me of that. One article mentioned how hard parallel programming is for humans. But programming in zeros and ones is hard too! We talk to machines best in the middle distance between very high-level concepts and very low level concepts.

Another article mentioned that we fare best psychologically in the middle distance between boredom and anxiety, called “the flow” by the psychologist with the unpronouncable name Mihály Csikszentmihályi. (Here you go, with X as in German ach or Scottish loch: mi XALE ee tshick shent mi XALE ee.)

His diagram summarizes his book.

I became a teacher to stand in the middle. “To teach” is a ditransitive verb: I teach a student a subject. I bridge the gap between the subject and the student.

Jesus is the Man in the middle, my Mediator. I think of that a lot.

Emily and I brought our friend Angelina Shannon a picnic lunch on Saturday to see her townhouse in York Springs and to catch up with her year since she graduated. Angelina told us a story of how our friends in Seattle showed Jesus’ love.

When Angelina was a student at Messiah College she helped Emily with her public school programs. She was in my honors first-year seminar, Science Fiction World Views, five years ago, the legendary Peer Group 43 (Pg43). The seminar bonded like no other class that I’ve ever been involved in, despite AJ and Danina disagreeing goodnaturedly about politics, and despite majors as diverse as Nursing (Ashleigh), Engineering (Mike), Political Science (AJ), Philosophy (Bryan), Mathematics (Angelina), English (Danina, Cory), Computer Science (Clayton, Chris), Psychology (Jim, Erin), and Sociology (Eric). Angelina’s parents threw Pg43 a party in their freshman year; Angelina threw Pg43 a Thanksgiving party in their senior year. Pg43 bonded so well that folks like Dee and Danielle asked to become “honorary members.” We saw Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers together.

After graduation four of Pg43 moved 3000 miles to Seattle, where none of them had ever lived, to find jobs and to live in community.

In August of their graduation summer, just before those four were to move, Danielle, now the fiancee of Brian, died in a car accident near their hometown of Chambersburg. All of Pg43 were at her funeral, and many stayed a week to be with Brian—a common thing in other cultures, but not at all common in our culture.

After moving to Seattle, the four thought that Brian needed a break from his job in Chambersburg where everything reminded him of his fiancee. They invited him to come to live with them with free room and board, to give him space to grieve, until he felt that he could make his own way there. Now he is making his way.

Maybe it’s because I just finished reading The Emerging Church, but this kind of love and hospitality strikes a chord with me. Maybe it’s because 54 years ago I was loved into the Kingdom, not argued into it.

James says (1:27 NIV), “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Brian was a widower before he was even a groom.

I’m proud to be known as a member of Pg43, one expression of Christ’s body, with a “religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless.”

[First entry newly added 03Nov2008]

For Mathematics

Dave Richeson

Dave is a colleague of mine at Dickinson College, the author of a new book, Euler’s Gem, about mathematics accessible to the scientific generalist. His blog is entertaining and informative.

For Philosophy

Micah Tillman

One of my former students offers interesting insights on philosophy, linguistics, theology, and his personal life. G. K. Chesterton says that angels fly “because they take themselves lightly.” This blog flies. A day without Tillman is … well … a day without Tillman.

For Reformed Theology

Scott Moonen

I’ve just finished reading as much as my mind can hold of David Bentley Hart’s
Beauty of the Infinite It’s an Eastern Orthodox treatment of philosophy based on starting with the Trinity. (My mind could hold about 1/4 from various parts of the book this summer. More another summer.) Scott in similar fashion writes starting with God, only from a Reformed instead of Eastern Orthodox perspective. Both Hart and Moonen are more subtle than Foundationalist theology, which is explicitly the Reformed view of my mathematics professor colleague John Byl at Trinity Western University in Canada.

Scott’s blog is not updated often. Scott, like Micah, is one of my former students. Scott wrote his blog software himself, so it’s missing navigation aids like tags and topics, so from time to time I will link to specific parts of interest, as I did in my first blog below. I appreciate Scott’s thinking Christianly.

For Sexuality

Warren Throckmorton

Warren is a psychology professor at a sister institution of mine, Grove City College. Warren finds things that interest me in the area of sexuality and posts here even before I knew that the topic was in the air.

For Sociology

Jenell Williams Paris

Jenell is a colleague of mine at Messiah College. An articulate anthropologist, Jenell writes engagingly on sexuality, on raising young boys, on college teaching, on evangelical subculture, and on feminism.

For Computer Science

Gene Rohrbaugh

My colleague Gene Rohrbaugh collects for the convenience of his Computer Science students interesting links about the field. Not updated frequently.