Some readers may be curious about the forthcoming Martin Scorsese film, Silence. The story follows two Jesuit priests (played by Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who leave Portugal in order to discover the fate of Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), a…
Any theological system worth its salt affirms that faith is a gift from God rather than the exercise of some innate power of the human soul. But that affirmation can be misleading, particularly so if one’s notion of “gift” is…
We only need to read the headlines in the morning paper or turn on the evening news to have confirmed what we already know to be true, suffering is an ever-present companion in this world. As a result of the…
We only need to read the headlines in the morning paper or turn on the evening news to have confirmed what we already know to be true, suffering is an ever-present companion in this world. As a result of the…
In previous posts, I have suggested that the question of suffering before God needs to remain an open question – a question that we, along with the Psalmists, bring before God in the midst of our grief, anger, and confusion.…
How can we avoid the extremes of monocausal fatalism, on the one hand, and open theism which insists that some events are “pointless” even to God, on the other? As I immersed myself in the Psalms after my cancer diagnosis,…
As I explored in the previous article in this series, my cancer diagnosis forced me to join the Psalmists in prayer more deeply than I had ever done before. I prayed the Psalms – especially Psalms of laments – with…
Who likes a complainer? Complainers are unsettling to be around. Holiday meals ruined by laborious and endless complaints about how life has shortchanged them – the car that broke down too early, the college that should have given admission, the…
The doctrine of divine impassibility has been much discussed, and it deserves to be: it is crucial for the Christian church to be able to confess the right thing about the omnipotent God precisely at this point, at the foot…
So the government authorizes, or the apparatus of the state undertakes, torture. So what? We live in a fallen world and we are not surprised that criminal activity insidiously seeps into the highest reaches of public authority and command. We…
