Tarot, Philosophy, and Christian Mysticism
Humans are a part of Nature, and God is said to transcend Nature. But yet Christ is supposed to be within us always. So God is both within us and beyond us. She is us. But She is beyond us as She is beyond everything. But somehow also incarnated in everything. This makes ideas like … Read more
One of my biggest takeaways from spending so many years in the halls of professional academic philosophy is that when it comes to the big, meaty questions of existence: nobody knows what the hell they are talking about. And that’s a good thing. It keeps us humble. And so it is also with my gender: … Read more
I am in continued amazement that my life turned out so well. Why me? Why are things so good? Are they always easy? No. But overall, I am blessed. I am grateful. Beyond grateful. By any reasonable metric of global human success, I am rich. However, I’ve found myself lately calling myself a Christian, or … Read more
“The Bible.” Just that phrase is enough to invoke an involuntary gag on my part, slightly disgusted at all the baggage it inherits from the particularly noxious American (and Southern) brand of toxic, evangelical Christianity I grew up with. There are two basic approaches to “The Bible”: one is faith-based, the other is…more critical, for … Read more
I was lost but now I was found. I was in darkness but now I have come into the light. I was broken and now I am saved. These are all familiar metaphors of Christian “testimony,” that age-old genre overflowing with cliches and dead metaphors whereby former nonbelievers recount how terrible their lives were until … Read more
I went into The Matrix Resurrections with zero knowledge or expectations outside of the trailers. And boy was I surprised at how much I liked it. I was surprised at how stunningly original and fresh this material was (I’ll return to this theme of originality again as it seems to be a theme in some … Read more
This post is the result of a spontaneous outflow of thought on Jung and Religion, as it relates to Christian Theology. Part prayer, part meditation, part musing, I hope you, the reader, enjoy the journey as I meander through the landscape of Christian theology while wearing Jungian lenses. My aim is to poetically explore the … Read more
Was Jesus a Stoic? If by “Stoic” we mean explicitly a member of the Hellenistic School of Philosophy started by the Greek philosopher Zeno in the 3rd century BCE, then no. But Jesus was not some backwoods carpenter with no exposure to the broader world of Greco-Roman philosophy. The Bible tells us He was learned, … Read more
When I was growing up in the Southern Baptist Church, my Pastor always denounced the dangers of relying on anything other than the literally-interpreted Word of God. He denounced the act of “cherry-picking” the parts of the Bible that we liked and ignoring the parts of the Bible we didn’t like. He would say cherry-picking … Read more
Did Jesus bodily rise from the dead? This is the core question of Christianity. Many Christians believe that the entire crux of Christianity depends on the truth or falsity of this claim. Such Christians believe that if we could someone travel back in time and discover that Jesus’ physical body was still in the tomb then the … Read more