Skip to main content

Prologue


At the beginning of the Metaphysics Aristotle declared that all humans have a natural desire to know. Whether curiosity is as universal a desire as he claimed or not, the desire for knowledge has certainly shaped my life.

This quest has been both complicated and facilitated by my faith. As a Christian raised in an evangelical home, I was brought up to expect the world to be comprehensible and that truth about the natural and social worlds would ultimately fit with the Christian faith. At the same time, much that was common knowledge to most of the world was off-limits had to be acquired late in life—I was woefully ignorant of the life sciences because of a commitment to young-earth Creationism, for example. Hope has proven stronger than fear and humility stronger than pride in enough cases, thankfully, that I have found my way out of some of my prior false dogmas. I remain committed to my faith, optimistic in the ability of humans to grow in wisdom and knowledge, and curious to learn more even though it comes with the pain of acknowledging my ignorance.

This blog is a space to try to continue to learn and share in community by working through questions that have attracted my interest for one reason or another. They will be essays in the traditional sense—attempts to make sense of something, tests of ideas. They will often fail to do their subjects justice or come to any conclusion. Nevertheless, I am persuaded that the attempt is worth the effort and I hope that they may prove worthwhile to anyone who happens to read them. I plan to be vulnerable and honest, and promise to do my best to avoid the natural tendency to react with hostility when faced with criticism. At the same time, I do not promise that every essay will work as a solution to its question and I reserve the right to revise my thoughts upon further reflection.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments.

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and please remember to be charitable in your comments.

Popular posts from this blog

The Role of Confusion in Education

What do you do when the world around you stops making sense? This is a question everyone faces at times and we each struggle through it in a variety of ways. From a brief moment of confusion to an enduring existential crisis, encountering disturbing experiences in the world is a part of the human experience. How one handles such moments of disorientation determines the form of the individual's growth, either channeling it in a direction that can assimilate the new experiences, or in a way that suppresses them. As a teacher, creating such moments of disorientation is an essential part of what I do. It is hard to learn when you think you know where everything is going. It is also hard to learn when you don't care about what is happening in front of you. Nothing breaks through apathy like a shocking example that does not fit one's assumptions about the world. A classroom crisis of this sort is usually operating on the margins of one's identity. For example, while tea...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does it mean to be conservative?

When asked recently by a few different people how I self-identify politically, I struggled. I have a visceral desire to identify as conservative, but I'm not sure that anyone would understand what I mean with the word. Thoughtful conversations and comments regarding my letter to Conor Friedersdorf and other posts have convinced me that trying to work out the meaning of conservative is necessary for effective dialogue. To begin this conversation,  I will consider the origins of the modern conservative movement and what light it sheds on politics in the era of Trump. The modern conservative movement began in reaction to the French Revolution of 1789. It was (and usually remains) reactive, opposing change rather than advocating for it. As such, it has tended to lack a normative description of how the world should be, and instead has generally opposed changes that threaten the order that is. This was the key idea that drove William F. Buckley, Jr. to found the National Review in 195...
2 comments
Read more

Rediscovering the Scandal of Evangelical Scholarship

I have been thinking a lot about the divergence in the rhetoric and the reality around the evangelical church and had a recent breakthrough. I became a scholar because that was one of the highest callings according to the evangelical community of my youth. Para-church evangelical organizations such as Summit Ministries , the National Christian Forensic and Communications Association , and publisher of my primary high school curriculum all encouraged cultural engagement. I repeatedly heard that my generation, those of us at these events and reading these books, were called to be leaders who would reshape our world  in light of the Christian gospel. For example, during a Teen Pact weekend retreat in Alabama in 2001, I remember Tim Echols inviting those of us at the event to stand up if we felt God's calling to serve in elected office sometime in the future. I stood (along with around a dozen others), willing myself to believe that I would someday be a member of the Senate (the Pr...
Post a Comment
Read more