Excelencifying comes in all sorts of forms and activities, and one of my is the quest for the perfect mayonnaise. When I was a grad student at the University of Chicago, I cooked in a restaurant, and one of the duties I relished most was making fresh mayonnaise, 2 or 3 quarts at a time. […]
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Pledge Your Allegiance
One of the New Testament readings for this past Sunday, October 18, featured the well-known line “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” (Matthew 22:21) Reading that line in the context of the encounter the author of Matthew narrates, it strikes me that this has […]
Continue ReadingWhat are you worth?
Prefer to listen? Here’s the podcast version of What are you worth? The parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, recounted in Matthew 20:1-16, features a parable about worth. Let me put this bluntly: this parable is an affront to every fair-minded human being. To show you why, let me write you into that story: […]
Continue ReadingWhat if God is serious?
A reflection on Trinity Sunday Trinity Sunday celebrates the triune nature of God, a concept with a long and difficult development in the early Christian community. The idea that God is three persons united in one “being” is tough. There’s no passage in the Bible where God announces, “I am actually three different persons, united […]
Continue ReadingThe Woman at the Well, II
I appreciate the many thoughtful responses to The Woman at the Well, and I appreciate the expressions of concern and even anxiety. All these thoughts and feelings have their place in our society’s current moment of self-examination, and I’d like to respond. I think a good approach is to dig a little deeper. “What was he […]
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Wednesday, June 17, was the anniversary of the murder of the Emmanuel Nine, and churches across the country remembered the victims and their families and congregations. These moments of reflection on lives lost to hatred are particularly poignant at this historical moment, when many white people are awakening to the legacies of racism in our […]
Continue ReadingGeorge Floyd: A reflection
Friends of Live Your Virtue: This message is for everyone who’s life and actions guide others. In other words, it’s for everyone — but especially for teachers, no matter what form that may take. Like many of you, I found the death of George Floyd in police custody deeply disturbing, and I’ve been struggling with a need to […]
Continue ReadingRebirth of philosophy?
Here’s an interesting observation about philosophy in “our time”: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20200114-why-philosophers-could-be-the-ones-to-transform-your-2020 Since my college days, when I first discovered the schools of Hellenistic philosophy, I have been fascinated by the ways in which those philosophers — the Stoics and Epicureans — addressed their theorizing to problems of living well. For that period, it was mainly about […]
Continue Readingthe tyranny of terms, part 1
I have a bit of an obsession with terms. More precisely, I like precision. I’m a philosopher, so my obsession with precise terms is something of an occupational hazard. I often find myself in conversations with people who feel constrained by terms and labels, so naturally, they resist policing for precision’s sake. I understand the tyranny of […]
Continue ReadingLeaving Innsbruck
I first heard Heinrich Isaak’s choral piece, Innsbruck, ich muß dich lassen, in a Renaissance music history course as an undergrad at Southwestern University. The piece (with the tune in the tenor voice) made me cry. I seem to recall telling my classmates that it was the saddest melody ever written. Isaak lived from 1450 […]
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