Monday, October 06, 2008
Books
Gregory A. Boyd: God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God.
Read this on a whim. Protestant Bible literalists - who come in 57 varieties - are forced to reconcile some contradictory passages regarding God's omnipotence & omniscience. They aren't very good at it. So they get hung up on matters of free will, predestination, foreknowledge of history, & salvation. Their churches & denominations split over those issues until they invented some of the most moronic expressions of Christianity in the history of the faith. They're uncomfortable with mystery, clueless about metaphor; the miraculous befuddles them in ways it rarely does poets & naturalists. This easy read for laypersons presents a "progressive" evangelical solution. It's an obvious middle way & one wonders why it took so long to admit it was "possible" all along. Not my way. I think it must be a hard sell to fierce Baptists & Presbyterians who consider Boyd an unrepentent liberal for this theology, & for his refusal to align his conservative religion with hard right politics.
I've never given a lot of deep thought to how God plays with unum Deum, factorem coeli et terrae powers, but I do sense play in it. I just run into paradoxes. A long essay by French philosopher Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, originally published in 1889, was very helpful at one point. The Vatican of his day accused him of pantheism, a good recommendation. One of Alan Watts' popular Hinduism for Dummies lectures, which used to air on WFMU, offered a metaphysical suggestion that worked, to my mind, with the Judeo-Christian concept of time, & with quantum physics.
Lance Morrow: Evil: An Investigation.
Sort of. TV host Craig Ferguson likes this book So relentless in the examples he presents that I had to take a break & put it aside halfway through. Also repetitive, more a collection of essays coming at the same subject from slightly different directions. His view is traditional rather than conservative or liberal. Morrow admits he has no unique insights. He concludes that yes, there is evil, & that its opposite is hope rather than good. Didn't we already know that?
Now I need write about some novels.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Read this on a whim. Protestant Bible literalists - who come in 57 varieties - are forced to reconcile some contradictory passages regarding God's omnipotence & omniscience. They aren't very good at it. So they get hung up on matters of free will, predestination, foreknowledge of history, & salvation. Their churches & denominations split over those issues until they invented some of the most moronic expressions of Christianity in the history of the faith. They're uncomfortable with mystery, clueless about metaphor; the miraculous befuddles them in ways it rarely does poets & naturalists. This easy read for laypersons presents a "progressive" evangelical solution. It's an obvious middle way & one wonders why it took so long to admit it was "possible" all along. Not my way. I think it must be a hard sell to fierce Baptists & Presbyterians who consider Boyd an unrepentent liberal for this theology, & for his refusal to align his conservative religion with hard right politics.
I've never given a lot of deep thought to how God plays with unum Deum, factorem coeli et terrae powers, but I do sense play in it. I just run into paradoxes. A long essay by French philosopher Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, originally published in 1889, was very helpful at one point. The Vatican of his day accused him of pantheism, a good recommendation. One of Alan Watts' popular Hinduism for Dummies lectures, which used to air on WFMU, offered a metaphysical suggestion that worked, to my mind, with the Judeo-Christian concept of time, & with quantum physics.
Lance Morrow: Evil: An Investigation.
Sort of. TV host Craig Ferguson likes this book So relentless in the examples he presents that I had to take a break & put it aside halfway through. Also repetitive, more a collection of essays coming at the same subject from slightly different directions. His view is traditional rather than conservative or liberal. Morrow admits he has no unique insights. He concludes that yes, there is evil, & that its opposite is hope rather than good. Didn't we already know that?
Now I need write about some novels.
Labels: religion, what I'm reading
