Category Archives: Spirituality & Faith
Belief, pt. 4: The Spirit’s Chisel
I live as though believing something makes it real: as though what I believe about God is true of Him, and has always been true of Him, and when I change my mind, He changes along with it. From one day to another, this feels natural, but when I consider how much my conception of [...]
Stockholm Syndrome
A few years ago, a girl named Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped from her home in Utah by a fanatical Mormon who wanted her as his second wife. Within two months, he and his wife were able to take her out in public with them, and she never tried to escape. When the police finally found [...]
Leo Tolstoy: You Preach, But How Do You Live?
“What about you, Lev Nikolayevich, you preach very well, but do you carry out what you preach?” This is the most natural of questions and one that is always asked of me; it is usually asked victoriously, as though it were a way of stopping my mouth. “You preach, but how do you live?” And [...]
The Greatest of These
“The greatest of these is love” because in the end, when God has finished creating the world, there will be no more need for faith or hope. But love will be perfected.
Do Not Mistake the Map for the Treasure
I visited a church last year and heard a children’s lesson that has been on my mind ever since. It was an object lesson: in front of the kids that day was a treasure box. The teacher pulled a series of items out of the box—dollar bills, toys, a soccer ball—and one by one he [...]
Disagreement with God
My only appointment in life is to agree with God. (Everything else comes from this.) God sees every person on the planet as having unsurpassable worth. Therefore, in agreeing with God, I must ascribe unsurpassable worth to every person on the planet.
Every person. My wife, my friends, my cubicle mate, my boss.
Every person. The waitress [...]
Three Stages of Passion
The three stages of passion:
Ignorant and excited
Knowledge, accompanied by disillusionment
Greater knowledge, resulting in renewed and lasting excitement
Each of them has its exclusive wisdom. There is a uniqueness in the optimistic curiosity that believes and hopes for the best; there is a uniqueness in the skepticism that causes a person to seek the truth and reject [...]
Selfless Faith
I want you to know that I understand.
I have never taken Islam or Mormonism seriously. I believe they are fabricated religions that gained traction because of charismatic founders and blind followers. They don’t pass the most basic tests of validity, and a person would need to remove the batteries from a great number of smoke [...]
Faith, pt. 2: Kenosis
The poem in Philippians 2 is the key to everything:
Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled [...]
On Creativity
Central to our universe is the concept of limits: that our creativity is restricted to that which already exists.
As an example, try to imagine what a sixth sense would look like. Science and movies offer their conjectures, but all descriptions of a proposed sixth sense are nothing but combinations of the other five senses. In [...]
