Many of my readers know that, in one of the great cosmic ironies, I am principal organist for a Lutheran church. In my post, “Emptiness,” I wrote about the experience of playing the organ in an empty space, and the surprising way this emptiness prompted me to notice what I was doing. I wanted to […]
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In case you’re wondering
I’ve gotten a few questions from some of my long-time readers about my series, A Philosopher Loose in Church. Most of you know me as a philosopher, and you probably know that I’m perfectly comfortable as a conceptual atheist. But a few of you have reached out to probe (very tactfully) into my motivation for […]
Continue ReadingNavigating the beliefscape
In a previous post, I put forward the notion of a “belief ecosystem,” intended to capture the idea that we live our lives in and through a variety of beliefs, both our own and those of others with whom we interact. Reflecting on this ecosystem, we realize that there are beliefs that harmonize with each […]
Continue ReadingDeliberative Empathy
There are two distinctive features of Aristotle’s ethics that are useful for us, and it so happens they are also key to understanding Aristotle’s “science of happiness.” First, Aristotle focuses not on character as some fixed and immutable quality, like temperament. Rather, his emphasis is on the development of character through the deliberate cultivation of […]
Continue ReadingModeration’s other half
According to Plato, moderation is about self-rule regarding our desires. Aristotle might take that in the direction of finding balance in and among our desires. But what are desires? Essentially, desires are impulses to act seeking a state of satisfaction. An individual desire needs moderation in the sense that we find the right balance — […]
Continue ReadingTraditional Virtues
I’ve been catching up after the winter storm in Texas, and I didn’t quite catch up enough to post last Sunday. So, today, I’m going to take a short detour and talk about excellences of mind and the traditional virtues. Some people have asked me why I don’t use the more common language of “intellectual […]
Continue ReadingPractically speaking
The gospel reading for the First Sunday in Lent, from Mark 1, recounts the familiar scene of Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan River. We tend to focus on the dramatic parts of that story: The cleaving of the heavens, the booming voice announcing the Beloved, the Spirit descending like a dove. But right […]
Continue ReadingBalancing Act
Taking a cue from Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean, I talked about humility as a balance between too much confidence, which produces deliberative arrogance, and too little confidence, which produces timidity. We can generally recognize the extremes when we see them (and especially when we encounter them in dialogue), but it’s a lot harder to […]
Continue ReadingFruits, Vegetables, and Relationships
Next time you visit your grocery store, take note of your relationship to produce. What do you look for? What are your expectations? Consider this: We’re doing to fruits and vegetables what we do to relationships. We’ve gradually come to expect produce to look like the glossy, air-brushed pics in magazines, and we think we […]
Continue ReadingTimidity
Deliberative humility can be conceived as a “mean between extremes,” which implies a continuum. At one end, we’ve seen what we might call deliberative arrogance, but what’s at the other end of the continuum? We don’t really have an adequate word for it, so I’m co-opting the word timidity — though diffidence usefully captures another […]
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