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General Christian

2013-04-02T10:29:37-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Easter: Tripping Over Joy

Last updated on: April 2, 2013 at 10:29 am By K. Mulhern

The Easter season has only just begun. It will go on for another seven weeks, and then it will go on for eternity. This poem, for me at least, captures both its magnificence and its munificence, its great grace and its hilarity. There is a laughter that comes when we are deeply relieved at having escaped a calamitous situation, at being saved from peril. The joy of Christ’s resurrection is palpable, riotous, and full of mirth. What a coup! What... Read more

2013-03-27T16:50:20-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Becoming Neo-Pascalian: From Gambling Table to Altar

Last updated on: March 27, 2013 at 4:50 pm By K. Mulhern

One of the concepts Pascal is best known for is his Wager, a longer fragment in Pensées (f. 418). Here Pascal brings his formidable mathematical mind, operating halfway between the gambling table and the altar, to the issue of faith, and plays with probability theory in the soul. It is such a rich and complex argument that I can’t even begin to deal with all its components. (Nor do I understand them all!) On the surface, it’s simple enough: “Let... Read more

Pascalian Spirituality: a series

Faith

Pascal

reason

2013-03-19T11:31:58-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Loving Mrs. Turpin, Loving the Grotesque

Last updated on: March 19, 2013 at 11:31 am By K. Mulhern

If I were less ordinary, reading Flannery O’Connor would be more fun. As it is, I inhabit the commonplace, and she lives in a different dimension, a place, as one critic put it, of living gargoyles. This makes reading her fiction a stressful and shocking experience. I imagine that, if she knew this, it would please her very much. Flannery O’Connor, one of America’s unique literary voices in the twentieth century, did not aim to soothe, or entertain, or please,... Read more

2013-03-12T22:09:30-06:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Becoming Neo-Pascalian: The Third Order

Last updated on: March 12, 2013 at 10:09 pm By K. Mulhern

In our last Pascalian conversation, I left you with fire. And if you’ve had an experience like Pascal’s, perhaps you feel that all this blather about science and reason and blah, blah, blah is highly irritating. Fire is warm and bright and compelling. Science and reason is cold and comfortless. Can we really come to faith without fire? Are we left with only reason or experience as avenues of faith? When I was in youth group, the kids with the... Read more

Pascalian Spirituality: a series

2013-03-03T18:52:50-07:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

My Mother’s Morals

Last updated on: March 3, 2013 at 6:52 pm By K. Mulhern

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom these days anyway, since it has been nearly thirty-three years to the day since I last saw her. And then I read this article: “Not Your Mother’s Morals”: A Review. And let me say up front, this post is no reflection on Jonathan Fitzgerald, his mother’s morals, his position on his mother’s morals, or his thoughts about your mother’s morals. This is not a comment about his book, which I have not... Read more

Tales from My Father

Faith

memory

2013-02-27T21:17:09-07:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

(One of) My History Hang-ups

Last updated on: February 27, 2013 at 9:17 pm By K. Mulhern

Any Star Trek fans out there? The Original Series? Do you remember the episode called “The City on the Edge of Forever”? No? Okay, here’s a short story, a blend of science fiction, mid-sixties silliness, and historical play: Dr. McCoy has passed through the Guardian of Forever, a portal into time and space that could take you anywhere. Captain Kirk and Spock need to rescue him and undo the historical damage he has done—something McCoy did has altered the past... Read more

Uncategorized

history

memory

2013-02-25T11:58:51-07:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Becoming Neo-Pascalian: Fire

Last updated on: February 25, 2013 at 11:58 am By K. Mulhern

When Pascal died, those who prepared his body for burial found sewn into the lining of his jacket a small piece of paper. Apparently he carried it with him everywhere he went, transferring it from jacket to jacket as they were changed, through the last eight years of his life. Clearly, this paper, called the Memorial, records something that Pascal believed to be pivotal to his view of the world, worth remembering every morning when he dressed, directive of all... Read more

Pascalian Spirituality: a series

2013-02-17T15:41:50-07:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Becoming Neo-Pascalian: An Indiana Jones Kind of Faith?

Last updated on: February 17, 2013 at 3:41 pm By K. Mulhern

Earlier we took a quick look at a scientific experiment conducted by Pascal in 1646, and we considered the ways that that experiment led him to two general “laws” of knowledge. If we want to know what is truly true, we will not rely only on what we’ve been told, and we will not rely on what seems most logical. We will use our reason, and we will discover the truth for ourselves. In our world, faith is treated as... Read more

Pascalian Spirituality: a series

2013-02-12T18:21:03-07:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Pascal, Ash Wednesday, and the Hidden God

Last updated on: February 12, 2013 at 6:21 pm By K. Mulhern

In the Anglican Ash Wednesday ritual, we pray for the grace of true repentance. Repentance means to turn around, which obviously means you’re going to be looking in a different direction, seeing something that was “behind your back” before. And what do we see when we repent? “Jesus Christ is the object of all things, the centre towards which all things tend. Whoever knows him knows the reason for everything” (f. 449). When we repent, we see Jesus Christ. The... Read more

Pascalian Spirituality: a series

2013-02-05T12:24:28-07:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Becoming Neo-Pascalian: Poised Between Two Worlds

Last updated on: February 5, 2013 at 12:24 pm By K. Mulhern

Last week we explored the Jansenist effort to reconstruct Christian community as the fellowship of the really-serious-no-compromise-do-it-right-all-the-time-damn-it. While part of me wishes I could actually be the ascetic that this demands, the other part of me is sitting here eating potato chips. I suspect Pascal had fewer bouts of self-indulgence, but something kept him from going all the way with the Jansenist agenda. That something may have been his passion for engaging the cutting edge ideas, discoveries, and concepts of... Read more

Pascalian Spirituality: a series

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