Asking the Question Today we ask what love is. Given how many people have tried to analyze the sensation, action, and essence of love, I suspect this attempt will leave us with more questions than answers, but we humans have always asked unanswerable questions. Why stop now? So what is love? There’s the welling up of tenderness in a mother’s chest when she gazes upon her child, the sensation of hormones that surge through a lover’s bloodstream, the unconditional regard of friends for one another, the reverent respect of student for teacher. But there’s also the adoring gaze of a hound for its human companion, the geese who spend their…
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The Way, Truth, Life: A Study in Universalism
The Best Way During my first year of seminary, I took a class on pluralism. I expected it to be something of a world religions course, one that taught us about other faiths so we could learn to live peacefully with those who believe differently than we do. After all, it seemed to me, when you live in a pluralistic country, you should be able to get along with people who aren’t like you. To my surprise, the course, while it did explore other religions, focused on how Christians could best preach the Jesus’s message to these nonbelievers. After all, everyone except I understood that Jesus was the way and…
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Little Bighorn and Healing from Our Past
The Beginning of the Great Sioux War In 1876, the United States started a new war with the Sioux Nation. They had been fighting off and on since the 1850s, but this was the final series of battles. Though the natives defeated Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn, slaughtering over half the troops who fought with him, a year later, in 1877, the United States military defeated them. Even though the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie guaranteed they could remain in the Black Hills in perpetuity, the Indians surrendered their lands and retired to the reservation. [1] So when did the hostilities start? Did this…
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Truth, Stages of Faith, and Our Political Divide
Living in a Parallel Universe What a week this has been. First, Raphael Warnock became the first black, and John Ossoff the first Jewish, men from Georgia to be elected to the United States Senate. Then, a mob, egged on by our president, broke into the Capitol building, thinking they had the power to stop the certification of the electoral college vote because Trump incorrectly implied that they did. Normally a routine ceremony, the certification was turned into a tedious farce by a few elected officials who chose to challenge the vote. They defended their actions by parroting the baseless claims of election fraud Trump has spouted for months, in…
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Truth and Our America
The Question of Truth Does such a thing as truth exist? If so, how do we define it? Is it relative, dependent on culture or worldview, making one truth as good as another? Can truth guide how we live and work and respond to the chaos overwhelming the United States today? The topic is huge. To explore it in depth would take a book. But there are some simple ideas we can look at. For instance, Michael Glanzberg, in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, notes that philosophers have devised many ways of understanding how we know truth from falsehood. One way is to use the correspondence theory of truth.…
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Honesty in the Face of Challenge
A Cycle of Lies Let’s call her Honey. She’d gotten pregnant. Her boyfriend was thrilled; she was not. If her parents learned she’d had sex outside of marriage, they’d be crestfallen. If her conservative Christian college found out, she’d be expelled. Since she was in a special program that would allow her to get a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree in only five years, she didn’t want to transfer someplace where she wouldn’t have the same opportunity. Besides, regardless of where she studied, Honey knew how stressful it would be to raise an infant while in school, and her career was important to her. She wouldn’t jeopardize that. To make…
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Opinion, Fact, and Truth
Truth from Out of the Void At a Recovery Church circle a few months ago, someone asked, “What is truth?” “Truth is core; it’s how everything starts,” came the first answer. According to the Hebrew Scriptures, everything started with chaos. Over the deep spread “a formless void and darkness” (Gen 1:2). That chaotic vastness still thrums in the background of space. [1] Like the swirl of emotions that allows us to nurture bonds and love our children, this primal music is part of our being. We are stardust; we are the incipient chaos. Does truth reside in that wildness, in those feelings? Vital and compelling, they can lead us to…
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Faith and Insecurity
Faith in Love What do you have faith in? When I ask myself that question, the first thing that comes to mind is that I have faith in life itself. I have faith in our resilience as a species, and in the resilience of the earth to revive, no matter what we do to her. That doesn’t make acceptable the abuse of one another and destruction of our habitat, but I do believe in the power of life to revive itself again. Next, I think of love. My faith in love is unwavering. Even though hate seems rampant right now, and even though at times in my life I tried…
