previous video replaced with the one above

At times I have feared that the world is one great clockwork machine just as the spiritual legacy of Isaac Newton and Thomas Jefferson and other Enlightenment thinkers has informed us. But one afternoon in 1975 I was walking past the desk of a classmate in a lab in the engineering school at the University of Virginia and this was playing. It put me in a trance at that moment and I have never forgotten it. I have replayed this music through the years and it has promised me, it has tantalized me with the tease that there is the possibility of something else. It conveys feelings that words cannot explain very easily. It has always inspired me and given me hope that the mystery of life has a positive and uplifting end. Not reduced to dreary mechanical laws devoid of hope and meaning. It has always been one of my favorite sermons. Thank you Bob Welch.  Bob wrote and performed this with Fleetwood Mac when he was with them.  Today he died.

Ironically, this video features mesmerizing astronomy pictures.  The very thing that helped our 16th and 17th century scientists begin to discover the mathematical and mechanical nature of the World.  Many thanks are due to them.

Myths to Live By

The year was 1986 and it was the Thursday a week before Thanksgiving when we learned that our second adoption attempt of the year had failed.  The young woman decided to keep her baby girl.  We were devastated.  It took five years to get pregnant with our first son.  The second one was Trisome 18 and lived five days.  We didn't know if we could get pregnant again.  Dorothy's folks drove over the next day from Memphis to Knoxville to console us.  That was nice.  We had a good time with them.  I was sad for a number of reasons.  One of the others is that I was looking for something else.  And I found it at the mall bookstore.  A book that propelled me in a mental and spiritual direction I was looking for but did not know existed.

Myths to Live By by Joseph Campbell

A week later we found out Dorothy was pregnant again!  Happy Ending.

More about Myths to Live By later.

To Be Like Jesus

The “adepts” in all religions are always forgiving, compassionate, and radically inclusive. They do not create enemies, and they move beyond the boundaries of their own “starter group” while still honoring them and making use of them. Jesus the Jew criticizes his own religion the most, yet never leaves it!

Richard Rohr "Falling Upward"

Jesus' Unconditional Love Wins

Several months ago I downloaded to my Kindle  Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Richard Rohr and only in the last few weeks have given attention to it.  It is great.  I'm clipping about every other paragraph because it has a pithy way of saying something of great meaning to me.  Here is one:

Jesus touched and healed anybody who desired it and asked for it, and there were no other prerequisites for his healings. Check it out yourself. Why would Jesus' love be so unconditional while he was in this world, and suddenly become totally conditional after death? Is it the same Jesus? Or does Jesus change his policy after his resurrection?

 

How to live as a Christian without having to believe the unbelievable

How to live as a Christian without having to believe the unbelievable

Should Christianity be about Believing the Unbelievable or Doing the Unbelievable?

Should Christianity be about Believing the Unbelievable or Doing the Unbelievable?

This is pertinent to my post of April 22.  Are we duty bound to believe the unbelievable?   Should we?  

Southerners

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die. —W. H. AUDEN

Itinerant Mind

Discovered an interesting web site recently titled Itinerant Mind.  I responded to a post regarding an article in the Stone Campbell Journal from 2010 titled Evolution as Mythology.  Itinerant Mind summarized the contents of the article.  There is an inclination inside of me to want to attempt to refute some of the things the authors assert and imply about the legitimacy and validity of evolution.  But I will not.  Instead, it may be noted that mythology and "not true" are not synonymous.  Humans must have vibrant and viable myths to live by.  And note  in my blog post below, the quote from Richard Rohr where he says that historical cultures all understood this.  Throughout human history we have crafted narratives concerning our origin which are designed to be useful for our living.  Since evolution has to do with who we are and where we came from, it is inevitable that we should weave it into our story.  And we will do it well and we will do it poorly.  I reckon that we do not live at the end of history and down the road our myths will continue to change and adapt with our conditions and knowledge. 

What is Faith II

This quote from Falling Upward by Richard Rohr is a beginning to my previous question regarding the nature of Faith.  Things that have to do with sentient creatures who have such a wide range of response due to their feelings and their interactions are on a different plane and of a different nature than the consistent and mechanical world of matter.  Weather and climate is an example of the latter. 

"Western rationalism no longer understands myths, and their importance, although almost all historic cultures did."

So we have over literalized the Bible and its meaning. A scientific, constitutional reading of the Bible is misguided. 

"You cannot imagine a new space fully until you have been taken there. I make this point strongly to help you understand why almost all spiritual teachers tell you to “believe” or “trust” or “hold on.” They are not just telling you to believe silly or irrational things. They are telling you to hold on until you can go on the further journey for yourself, and they are telling you that the whole spiritual journey is, in fact, for real—which you cannot possibly know yet."

It appears that in regard to "faith", the evangelical world thinks it is a badge of honor if one can make the leap of faith even if the evidence is not conclusive.  The explanation that Rohr puts forth is that experience or journey can take us to where we need to be.  I've got to think that the content of what one becomes confident about is different in these contrasting cases.

What is Faith?

I came across something that gave me pause.  It is a quote by a Christian man, Paul Douglas, who is a Meteorologist by profession and moderate Republican.  He says:

I’m a Christian and ultimately come to Christ through faith. With climate change no faith is required. There is a large and growing body of evidence. (link)

My conundrum is this.  I was always taught that we should believe in Christ and Christianity because the teaching about him and the story of Christianity is reasonable and has been proven to be correct by a substantial body of evidence.  After all, why should I accept it if not proven true?  But here he is contrasting faith with something else that does have, in his opinion, a large body of evidence.  So if Christianity does not have this body of evidence, why should we place so much confidence in it? 

The Gospel of Trees

One of the recurring themes of this blog relates to the meaning of trees.  Recently came across a website called The Gospel of Trees.  They have nice pictures and nice quotes, from ancient to modern times.  Trees have roots and they reach down into the depths of the earth and the depths of our psyches.  The first section was lifted from the About section of the blog.  Then follows a quote from Miroslav Wolf from another pane.

The Bible is a story about trees. It begins, or nearly enough, with two trees in a garden: the Tree of Life, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The pivotal event in the book comes when a man named Jesus is hanged on a tree. And the last chapter of the last book features a remade Jerusalem: “In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” If you understand the trees, you understand the story.

The words and images here are presented in no particular order: this is a mosaic rather than a narrative. Clicking on the arrow at the top right of each content page will take you randomly to another page on the site. 

Also, this mosaic is a work in progress: more text and images will be added to it over time.

This site is one of the lesser fruits of the Project on Lived Theology. I am greatly indebted to Charles Marsh, the founder and Director of PLT, and to the other members of the Virginia Seminar, who have greatly enriched my life in recent years.

My name is Alan Jacobs. Any text and images on this site that are not explicitly credited to others are created by me.

The site is designed by my very talented friend Brad Cathey. Hosting is by Highgate Cross. 

The Gospel of the Trees by Alan Jacobs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

There is a remarkable image in the closing pages of Scripture that has become a touchstone for the way my colleagues and I think about faith and culture. Amid its descriptions of the New Jerusalem, Revelation includes “the tree of life, bearing 12 crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Rev. 22:2). The tree holds out hope that whole cultures will be healed and mended, becoming places where people can flourish. And it sets an agenda for faith as a way of life that contributes to that flourishing, in anticipation, here and now.

— Miroslav Volf

 

The Cutest Little Doll-Shaped Molecules You Ever Did See

The Cutest Little Doll-Shaped Molecules You Ever Did See

Christ in Evolution

Have taken up Ilia Delio's Christ in Evolution.  This book was prior to her The Emergent Christ which I completed a few weeks ago.  Here are a few of the many things that have jumped out at me so far. 

The mechanistic view of the world associated with Newtonian physics has been replaced with a dynamic, open ended view of the world in which some events are in principle unpredictable. At the infinitesimal level of the atom and its subatomic particles, quantum mechanics has uncovered a realm where time, space, and matter itself behave according to laws whose very functioning have uncertainty built into them. Quantum physics has given us a new view of matter today as not only indeterminate but also as relational.The universe seems to be inherently relational.*

*Ian Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (London:  SCM Press 1997)

John Polkinghorne, who notes that “both chance and necessity are indispensable partners in the fruitful history of the universe.” “The role of chance does not turn evolution into a cosmic lottery,” he states, “but is the way the physical world explores and realizes its potential.”**

** John Polkinghorne, Science and Theology, (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press 1998).

In the light of this, what she says earlier in the book about Christ makes a lot of sense to me.  The universe is evolving according to a plan and

Christ is the “design” of the universe because the universe is modeled on Christ, the divine Word of God; the universe is Christologically structured. Because the universe has a “plan,” we can speak of the evolution of this plan as the unfolding of Christ in the universe, who is “the mystery hidden from the beginning” (Eph 3:9).

International Surface Temperature Initiative

This week I am attending the 9th International Temperature Symposium.  It is held once every ten years.  Heard an interesting talk this morning by Peter Thorne.  He is involved in the International Surface Temperature Initiative. He indicated that even without temperature information, we can be assured that there is global warming is occurring.  Nonetheless, this initiative is attempting to improve the temperature records and make them available since "the rate and temporal/spatial details are the issue."

Did Jesus “Do What the Bible Says”? Some thoughts on Jesus, Biblical Formalism, and Problem of Indeterminacy

Did Jesus “Do What the Bible Says”? Some thoughts on Jesus, Biblical Formalism, and Problem of Indeterminacy  

Matt's Theoprudence blog  at the above link discusses two types of interpretation of Biblical text:  formalist and purposive.  The prime example that illustrates this problem of interpretation concerns Jesus healing on the Sabbath.  From a formalist approach, Jesus clearly broke the rule that prohibits work being performed on the Sabbath.  However, in one of the texts, it is said that he says that the Sabbath was made for mankind and not mankind for the Sabbath.  This implies that the rule is not absolute but has lots of wiggle room based on an inferred purpose of the rule.

Since early adulthood, in a break with my traditional conservative Reformation and Restoration Movement roots, I have come down on the purposive side of things.  I would give a hat tip to Professor Andy T. Richie for aid in starting me down that path.  He took us through the book of Matthew in the Life of Christ class my sophomore year at Harding.  How can one think otherwise after a close reading of the Sermon on the Mount?

For a humorous application of the formalist approach see my daughter-in-law's blog post here.  She is in law school and the interpretation of laws is somewhat important in that occupation.