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- Bruce on Ode to a Cat
- Aslandad on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
- Rotating Pilgrim on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
- Rotating Pilgrim on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
- Rotating Pilgrim on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
Category Archives: Religion
“The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
“So I resolved to do a very peculiar thing. I resolved to keep death in view–constantly, daily. And if you’ve read a lot of my work on this blog, then you know how I continue to work through the dynamics of holding onto faith while simultaneously refusing to allow faith to repress death anxiety. I try to hold both–faith and death–firmly in view. And why, you might ask, would I intentionally engage in this odd and existentially unsettling activity? Why not let faith eliminate or repress my death anxiety? Because this path of mine is the only way I know of which can assure me that my faith isn’t, to use Sartre’s term, bad faith, that my faith has nothing to do with repressing death anxiety or awareness.”
“I might sound morbid, dwelling about death all the time. But I’m not depressive. The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness. Poignancy is the feeling I have when I tuck my boys in at night. Life is so short and I have no way to know how much time we will have together. It was poignant to drive my mom to MD Anderson. And it was poignant to wait for her during her appointments. I find everything, because the North Wind is with me, poignant. It is…
Posted in Philosophy, Religion
Tagged Death, Faith, George MacDonald, Poignancy, Sadness, Sartre
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Joe The Peacock: How To Actually Talk To Atheists (If You’re Christian)
An atheist, Joe the Peacock, giving advice to Christians on their methods of evangelism. Note his use of a great GK Chesterton line.
Witnessing is interruption marketing.
It’s unfortunate but true – just about every method of “witnessing” to non-believers equates to human spam. To start, I’ll list just a few of the methods we all know about:
Posted in Religion
Tagged atheism, Christianity, evangelism, marketing, spam, witnessing
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Søren Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship
Søren Kierkegaard’s expansive set of texts are complicated enough without considering the ambiguity or duplicity that his pseudonymous authorship presents. Involving and reacting to Hegel and other contemporaries, moving in stages, and talking deeply about matters of faith, philosophy, ‘individuals’, and systems of knowledge, Kierkegaard’s work is already significant. Yet, a reader who reads the whole of Kierkegaard’s work straightforwardly as ‘the words of Kierkegaard’ will be misled by the interplay of his texts, and led to believe in a certain kind of development in his writing, a development from an aesthetic author to a religious author. Also, the definitions of words (i.e. “sin”) can vary across the works. Only by taking into account the pseudonyms and Kierkegaard’s authorial method can one form a strong understanding of his life’s work.
Posted in Philosophy, Religion, Writings
Tagged Authors, Christianity, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Modernism, Plato, Postmodernism, Pseudonyms
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Overwhelming My Doubts Daily
From the internetmonk:
This is my own experience. I cannot remove my doubts, but I cannot erase my faith. At every level, these two experiences exist together, convincing me that I am, indeed and exactly, the kind of contradiction that Luther believed all Christians were at the center: both righteous and sinful simultaneously. (Simul justus et peccator.) While these two experiences are at war over the most basic assumptions of my life, they actually blend together into a single experience that is what one person called “the awesomeness of being human.”
At a fundamental level, I cannot get past the fact that the universe exists, and it is completely unnecessary. That there is something rather than nothing overwhelms my doubts daily. No matter how many times the brevity and meaninglessness of human life plunges me into despair, I look at the world around me, at the Hubble photos, at the beauty of the mountains or of my children, and cannot explain why these things should exist, could exist, or have any possibility of existing if some being did not call all this into existence, and sustain this universe out of pure pleasure. It is not the God of deism or of Islam or Aristotle that explains this. It is the God of Colossians 1:16 For by him all things were
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Michael Spencer on Victimhood and the Gospel
Spencer served as moderator on a panel at Cornerstone Festival this year discussing homosexuality. He posted reflections on the panel discussion on his blog, Internet Monk. He worried about urges to cast-off what is termed “heteranormativity” in order to allow the victimhood of an oppressed group become the arbiter of biblical exegesis. He then comments further on this idea:
“The mistreatment and oppression of various groups is part of the Biblical story and part of how God reveals himself in scripture, but when we come to the Gospel itself, there is a deep challenge to any idea of empowerment that is based on violence or being the victim of violence. The centrality of Christ and the cross signal a shift- for all of us, and for every group- away from our own victimization to embracing Christ as the ultimate victim through whom all of us are set free. We do not emerge from the New Testament as victimized groups.”
Posted in Religion
Tagged Christianity, Exegesis, Heteronormativity, Homosexuality, Michael Spencer
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