Anyone with an email account knows the flutter of daily inbox arrivals ranging from the most trivial to the most vital. For someone just publishing the results of something like fifteen years (really a life’s worth) of reading and thinking in a book called Ars Vitae (The Art of Living), discovering an email one day…

“All of this presupposes that we are creatures capable of observing, sustaining, and living suspended in the fragile beauty of the world around us, within us, and beyond us” (p. 358, emphasis added). With these words, Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn concludes her argument calling for a recovery of inwardness in response to a pervasive culture she terms…

I’ve always been amused by the fact that the nineteenth-century art movement Impressionism got its name from a satirical review of Claude Monet’s painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise). Louis Leroy created a fictional dialogue between observers of the painting, having one of them say that “a preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more…

In Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn canvasses five ancient schools of practical-philosophical thought. Contemporary intellectual and cultural trends, she contends, bear various relationships of ancestry and family resemblance, and in some cases of shared nomenclature, to these ancient schools and can be usefully…

In Book Ten of his Confessions, Augustine makes the seemingly incontrovertible claim that everyone wishes to be happy. “We hear the word ‘happiness,’ and all of us admit that we strive for the thing itself” (10.29). There’s not a person in this world, Augustine says, who doesn’t have some intuitive sense of the meaning of…

René Descartes introduced the modern notion of a “law of nature.” The Medieval Scholastic notion of “natural law” was more of a teleological notion; and in particular with respect to human beings, “natural law” described not how we in fact behave but how we ought to behave—the “unnatural” was, in effect, the deviant. The Cartesian…

Does God break the laws of nature? Having ordained the laws in the first place, God clearly has the ability to do so. And Scripture seems to reveal God breaking such laws in the past, from axe heads that float (2 Kgs 6) to the parting of the Red Sea (Exod 14). Many answers to…

The first instinct of many would be to answer “Yes” to this question. For God to “act in the world,” they suppose, would be for God to “intervene” in the natural course of events. Such divine intervention would be an external supernatural cause that interrupts natural cause-and-effect relations and therefore contravenes the laws that govern…

You may have heard the claim that God cannot answer prayers because that would violate the laws of nature, which determine everything that happens. This view reflects an outdated, but still popular interpretation of the laws of nature. It dates back to the time when people were deeply impressed by the success of Newton’s laws…

“Complex question” is the label that logicians give to a particular kind of fallacy in which the answer to a question is already implicit in the way in which it is framed. The classic example is: “when did you stop beating your wife?” The issue that we are considering here is not quite a complex…

“Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” Almost hidden within the Genesis creation account stands this singular sentence about God’s creation of humankind. Revealed is God’s creative act; implied is the dual nature of…

A Review of Joshua Cockayne, Contemporary with Christ: Kierkegaard and Second-Personal Spirituality I was in a Master of Arts program in analytic philosophy of religion when I first discovered Kierkegaard, and it was Kierkegaard who led me “on principle” away from analytic philosophy. Though I have made my home mostly in the continental tradition, I…