Something Like an Introduction To begin, an anecdote: I was asked recently to referee a paper for a philosophy of religion journal. I ended up declining to review the paper because I knew who its author was, but I did read it. I’ll not name the author here, of course, but I will tell you:…

Introduction: Theology and Philosophy (In General) Lesslie Newbigin saw Western intellectual history as the confluence of two streams, one flowing from Greco-Roman antiquity, the other from the Christian Scriptures. The barbarian tribes that called Europe home during the medieval and early modern periods “were taught to think in Greek and Latin, but the story that…

A Quick Story In 2007, I gave a paper at Oxford University for the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion titled “Why God Might be Poly-present, not Omnipresent.” Though not a gem of an essay, I basically argued that Scripture consistently presents God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—in particular spatial location, not ubiquitously present everywhere…

Future historians will be able to capture the spirit of our time by recognizing our gradual loss of certainty. Even in the present we can see that both our intellectual and popular cultures manifest the disintegration of traditional categories of thought, assumptions, behavior, and belief. All of this disintegration has left us with the specter…

If you have ever played chess or some similarly structured game with someone of comparable experience, you understand that the quest for certainty can seem particularly elusive. For any one move, the number of possibilities is quite limited, often restricted to a single option or two. In chess as with much else in life, we…

Like Theophilus of Luke’s gospel, many American, inerrantist evangelicals today are expectant “to know the certainty of the things [they] have been taught” (Luke 1:4). As I reflect upon the forum topic, three questions come to mind: 1) How did we get to the point we are now? 2) What options remain? 3) How does…

Modern assumptions about certainty are deeply embedded in the contemporary mind. Exhausted by Medieval debates over seemingly obtuse metaphysical matters, Modern philosophers broke away from this tradition by establishing “certainty” as the new measure for what counts as human understanding. Some philosophers, such as Descartes and Leibniz, thought we could prove the existence of God…

“Fruit” and “Genesis” is a juxtaposition with a long and infamous history. It recalls a story passed on from generation to generation, connecting us to our ancestors, for good and for ill. Fruit, in the first instance, is about fruitfulness. Originally, we are told, the earth was luscious and vivacious, teeming with flora and fauna….

I benefited from reading Cabal and Rasor’s book in a variety of ways. It is written in a clear and accessible style and covers a lot of ground in an admirably concise fashion. Its particular strengths in my view are: 1) its attention to the history of these discussions in the church, 2) its focus…

In my last post, “Identities of Accused Witches,” I listed the most common identities of those who are said to be witches. The question for this post is, “how do we know and identify a witch?” Basically, the question is that of epistemology and it is an important one in dealing with the whole question of…

One of the critical features of the way that people talk about “witchcraft” in African contexts is the idea that witches do not usually identify themselves publicly. After all, they are engaged in antisocial behavior, and so it is to be expected that they would want to remain hidden from view.[1] The challenge for ordinary…

The four educators highlighted in my last post all ground their theories of experiential learning in a philosophy called constructivism.  What is constructivism?  Is it compatible with Christianity? What follows are my in-progress ruminations on these questions.  By no means have I found definitive answers.  Regardless, I continue to think about these issues because they…