Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.

• Your life is temporary. The things of this life (the “life immediate”) are temporary
• The life you are looking forward to is eternal. So are the things of that life.
• Consequently the wise thing to do is to focus on the life to follow.
• The God who has made a way for you to enter into the life to follow has every desire that you succeed.
• When you think that he is disapproving of you because you are focusing on the life immediate, you are wrong.
• This is because you think that while you are focusing on the life immediate, God is as well. The reality is, God is always focused on your life as a whole: your immediate life and your future life, and how they relate to each other.
• This is the tip of the iceberg that is an uncomfortable reality: many of the things you belief about yourself are lies.
• You come to believe these lies through reinforcement by dwelling on them; lies like “I am not worthy.” “I am not redeemable.” “I have gone to far to come back again”
• The hard thing to remember is that these lies are not overcome and replaced by reminding yourself that they are, in fact, lies, but rather by focusing on the truth: “I am worthy.” “I have been redeemed because I was redeemable.” “I am never too far to go back, in fact I can go back now, this moment.”

Consider, meditate. Rinse, repeat.

Sometimes I think we should worry less about whether or not God is real and worry about how much more real he might be than us. There’s a frightening aspect to a reality where you are vapor and mist next to a being whose solidity outstrips the very earth you stand on.

By happenstance I ran across Arthur Peacocke’s wikipedia article which, to my dismay, intimated that he had died on October 21st of this year. The news confirmed it.

You may be wondering who the Rev. Dr. Arthur Peacocke was, and with good reason. I have never really heard his name outside of selective circles. I myself only ran across him in my research on divine action (God’s interaction with the world). Peacocke’s particular view is described as a kind of “top-down” or “whole-part” causation in which God is the mind and the world is the body, but God is totally transcendant and immanent in a way that is contrary with how the “I” does not transcend the human body ontologically. (read more here.)

Peacocke did much for the proposal that evolution and theistic belief not necessarily be at odds with each other. This is evident in books such as Evolution: The Disguised Friend of Faith?, Creation and the World of Science: The Re-Shaping of Belief, and Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming-Natural, Divine and Human. Incidentally, Peacocke was also an ordained priest in the Church of England, a founding member of The International Society for Science and Religion, the founder of The Society of Ordained Scientists, and a council member of The European Society for the Study of Science And Theology. He was also awarded the Templeton Prize (795,000 GBP or approx. 1.4 million US dollars in 2006) for Progress in Religion, which he mostly donated to the Ian Ramsey Centre at Oxford (which he founded). Other recipients have been Mother Theresa, Billy Graham, Bill Bright, and Chuck Colson. Interestingly, the award is adjusted so it exceeds the Nobel Prize.

God’s peace be with you, Arthur.

I imagine everyone reading this is familiar with those “life checklists,” those lists of things you want to do in your life. Whether written down or merely stuck up in your head, I imagine everyone has them. Be it “learn Japanese,” or “eat a grasshopper,” we all have those things that we either want to do once, or make it an ingrained habit to do them. Personally, I’m trying to read more generally, read more poetry, and bring my life into some semblance of order (it’s going slow).

I’ve also really wanted to go see the local symphony perform. I haven’t always desired to do this, but it’s been on my mind for a couple years, especially since I’ve become enraptured with Mozart. There’s just something about his work that gets to me; moreso even than other classical composers. I don’t know what it is. Last year I believe they performed his Mass in C Minor (which is astounding) and my roommate and I had talked about going but never did.

This year they had Mozart’s Requiem on the bill, and we just couldn’t pass it up. Season tickets in hand, we headed downtown to the Kansas City Lyric Theater, got our seats, and experienced something that I daresay everyone should attempt to at least once in their life. It helps that the Requiem is my absolute favorite piece by Mozart. I suppose I might not have been so happy with a piece I was less familiar with (understanding the Latin pays off), but still, it would probably be worth it. The sound was incredible, and deeply moving.

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If you’ve been following the news lately you know how Muslims around the world have responded negatively towards remarks in Pope Benedict XVI’s speech at the university of Regensburg. For the sake of a coherent post, I’ll summarize. In the first part of the speech, Benedict quoted the medieval emperor Manuel II Palaiologos, who, in a dialogue with a “learned Persian” said the following:

“Show me just what Mohammad brought that was new and there you will find things only bad and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Now making the assumption that Benedict intended to claim the thoughts and intentions of Palaiologos as his own, Muslims around the world have made death threats, burned the current pope in effigy, and so on (in fairness many of these actions may have been made by extremist groups). The problem is that the quote is taken entirely out of context. The full text of the pope’s speech has hardly anything to do with Islam or Muhammed at all. In fact, it’s a discourse on the proper interworkings of faith and reason. And I must say, it’s quite good. Benedict expounds upon the Greek philosophical roots of reason in Christianity, and the trend towards subjective reinterpreting of the gospel (a stunning indictment of the Emergent movement).

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