An Experience of Grace in Nature
Raised as I was by relentlessly secular parents, I was not allowed to have a religion, and used to sneak out of the house to go to Mass with Catholic friends the way other teenagers snuck out to drink or smoke.
Personal Religion Archives
January 9, 2007 11:05 AM
Comments (7)February 2, 2007 9:05 AM
To WHOM It May Concern
The urge to pray, to send out on the great blog in the sky a theological SOS and/or thank-you note, is so strong a human impulse that even people who don’t believe that anyone hears their prayers, people who have no religious dogma that tells them to whom they ought to pray, pray anyway. I am one of them.
February 15, 2007 9:45 AM
For Many Religions, Sex Both Blessing and Curse
Sex and religion are joined at the hip. The most interesting distinction is not between religions that say 'yes' to sex and those who say 'no' but between two aspects of a single religion, one of which regards sex as a blessing and the other as a curse.
May 22, 2007 9:32 AM
The Forest-Dweller Stage of Life
In the midst of the great city of Chicago, I live as a forest-dweller. Forest-dwelling is where I am now in my life, and, yes, I am satisfied—or, more precisely, grateful--to be there.
June 1, 2007 7:53 AM
Gods of Peace and Gods of War
Traditionally, war has strengthened faith. “There are no atheists in foxholes,” we say (a cliché against which the official organization of American Atheists lodges formal protests from time to time). Any time when we bury the dead is a moment that, to borrow Samuel Johnson’s phrase, concentrates the mind wonderfully, the sort of moment for which religion was invented.
July 9, 2007 8:10 AM
A Chaplain for Every Soul
Sure I’d vote for a Pagan (I think I probably already have, quite often), but I don’t think there should be a Pagan chaplain. There are two different issues here, complicated by the fact that there are two very different sorts of people that have been called Pagans.
The first sense of the word is the traditional bigoted Christian term of opprobrium; the shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines “pagan” simply as “heathen, unenlightened person,” and the full-length OED says: “A person not subscribing to any major or recognized religion, esp. the dominant religion of a particular society; spec. a heathen, a non-Christian, esp. considered as savage, uncivilized, etc. Now chiefly hist.” A pagan in this chauvinist sense is just someone who doesn’t have the brains, or the luck, to be a Christian.
September 6, 2007 11:30 AM
Letting God Off the Hook
In our culture, disasters such as Katrina and 9/11 are often the occasion on which we confront the problem of evil publicly together, though of course as individuals we bump into it every day, and theologians have broken their heads over it 24/7 for thousands of years.
After the desperate scramble for survival, for shelter, water, food, after searching for the living and then searching for the dead, it is time to bury the dead and to grieve, and that is always a moment that, to borrow Samuel Johnson's phrase, concentrates the mind wonderfully. Christians and, to a lesser extent, Jews, have approached the problem of evil with monotheistic blinders and fallen into the trap of the four-fold paradigm: God is good (or merciful), God is all-knowing, God is all-powerful, and there is evil. How could God do this to us? (Woody Allen, a much under-rated theologian, came up with the best answer to these questions, I think: God is not evil, he’s just an underachiever.)
But Hinduism, the religion I know best, is not hobbled by monotheism, and therefore most Hindus do not assume that their god is merciful, or all-knowing, or all-powerful, though they are well aware of the existence of evil, which they formulate in a more basic and existential, rather than monotheistic, way. The question then becomes, not, How could God do this to us? but How can this happen to us? Why us?
