The Philosophical Optimist

            I have heard it said that you should not care about what a man thinks about anything unless you first know what he thinks about everything.   That is, a man’s general worldview affects everything about him, and is perhaps the most important thing about him to know.   It is unfortunate, then, that too many of us spend so little time reflecting on how we view the stage upon which we find ourselves playing out this drama we call human history, and how much of our thinking on the subject we allow to be outsourced to the general cultural climate of our time.             That climate is, as it has always been, one of idolatry; it is only the specific idols of the era that change, and even those only so much.   Two thousand years ago, Christ had warned us that we could not serve both God and Mammon—a Canaanite deity who, like his Classical equivalent Plut...

“[He made] the stars also”—Genesis 1.16b             Growing up Christian in the Bible Belt of the American South is no doubt different from growing up some other places.   In such an environment it is not at all strange for someone to ask you for your favorite verse of scripture.   As a lifelong learner and a teacher, my personal favorite was always Christ’s words, “You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free”; for as another wise man once wrote, “truth is truth, / To th’ end of reck’ning” (Isabella, from William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure V.i.45-46).             Still, as we played these occasional games of scripture quotation, there was always some wisenheimer who would quote John 11.35.   You had to be a wisenheimer to quote John 11.35 because it is the shortest single verse in the English Bible.   There, in the story of the ...

              I love finding pearls of wisdom in the rubbish pile of popular culture, and one particular pearl I found several years ago was a line spoken, appropriately, by the perpetually optimistic Barnabas T. Stinson, who said, “no one is hotter than God.”   This is a remark of deep theological wisdom with which the Christian mystics would concur, and the Muslim Sufis as well.   God is the end of all our desiring, especially those desires we will never admit to—and so, like any repressed desire, he is a perpetually hot topic of discussion, destined to be talked about—or at least around—not least by those who most passionately insist that he does not exist—and they do not desire him—at all.             And yet, in all this perpetual discussion, there is much confusion.   It seems to me that a great deal of this confusion on the topic of God could ...