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September 2023

September 04, 2023

Should My Time Be For Sale? A Labor Day Reflection

What follows is a story from my current book project--Nice Work if You Can Get...

September 03, 2023

The Moral Life in One Sentence

A couple of years ago, I was interviewed in my office by a reporter from The...

August 2023

August 31, 2023

Creating a Sabbath Culture (why everyone should have sabbaticals)

Fall semester classes started last Monday. And I'm on sabbatical, not returning to the classroom...

August 29, 2023

Asking the Right Question

Several years ago during my four-year stint as chair of the Providence College philosophy department,...

August 27, 2023

The Great Homesickness We Could Never Shake Off

The first draft of my first sabbatical book project is completed, minus the introduction and...

August 24, 2023

The Problem with Wisdom, Part Two

Last week I posted an essay called “The Problem with Wisdom, Part One,” inspired by...

August 22, 2023

The Big Sister I Always Wanted: Remembering Marsue three years later

It doesn't seem possible that it has been exactly three years since Marsue Harris, one...

August 20, 2023

Even the Best of Us has Bad Days

A conversation heard behind the scenes: Dude! Did you see what just happened?? How could...

August 17, 2023

The Problem with Wisdom, Part One

In much wisdom there is much grief, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. Ecclesiastes...

August 15, 2023

What College is Good For

I began gathering materials for my main sabbatical book project five years ago. Thanks to...

August 13, 2023

What Are You Doing Here?

After a number of years of engaging with social media, primarily Facebook and Twitter (which...

August 10, 2023

If No One Reads Me, Have I Wasted My Time?

Women are not wrong at all when they reject the rules of life that have...

August 08, 2023

Dreamers Who Get Things Done

Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. This, promises...

August 05, 2023

When What I Want to Believe Isn’t True: Reflections on the latest indictment of Donald Trump

What do you do when virtually all of the evidence relevant to an important matter...

August 03, 2023

Did He Walk On the Water or Didn’t He?

The summer Sunday gospel readings annually are full of Jesus' greatest hits, including feeding the...

August 01, 2023

To celebrate “Freelance Christianity’s” 11th anniversary, here’s its #1 post from the past decade

Happy August! This month marks the 11th anniversary of the "Freelance Christianity" blog, something I...

July 2023

July 29, 2023

Jesus Would Have Driven Socrates Crazy

When we first moved to Rhode Island in the middle 1990s for my new teaching...

July 27, 2023

Can I Be Both a Philosopher and a Christian?

I am not a regular reader of Christianity Today, but the title of Jon Ward’s...

July 25, 2023

God is Not a Helicopter Parent

Every teacher knows about helicopter parents. Most of us, teacher or not, intuitively know what...

July 23, 2023

You Say You Want a Revolution?

There is a saying, particularly popular among conservatives, that “A conservative is a liberal who...

July 20, 2023

Achieiving the Peaceable Kingdom

One Sunday morning a number of years ago, I noticed that a reproduction of a...

July 18, 2023

Do I Teach or Am I a Teacher? On Being a Verb Rather than a Noun

I have two book projects in the works these days. I just finished a full...

July 16, 2023

Limitations, Shortcomings, and Contentment

For the past many years, my upper-division (juniors and seniors) classes have included an ongoing...

July 13, 2023

Why Is God So Wasteful?

As of next month, I will have been blogging for eleven years. As I suspect...

July 11, 2023

Complete Sentences in One Word

All of us live in a world filled with words. For academics, words are the...

July 08, 2023

What We Can Learn about Trust from a Corgi

It's hard to believe that our corgi Bovina, the love and center of Jeanne's and...

July 05, 2023

Is There Life Before Death?

A few years ago I had the opportunity to hear one of my heroes give...

July 03, 2023

Sitting in Safety Without Fear–an Independence Day Reflection

Every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig-tree, and there shall...

July 02, 2023

Can We Negotiate With God?

Today's reading from the Jewish scriptures is Genesis 22, the well-known and infamous story of...

June 2023

June 29, 2023

The Burden of Light

Teaching for thirty years in an interdisciplinary program with colleagues from a multitude of disciplines...

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