Category

Christianity

Personal God or Transpersonal God?

  Bill Eckert: Do any of you hold a non-personal view of God? If so, is your worldview distinct from naturalism? Jay McDaniel: Bill, my own view is that God can meaningfully be conceived in both personal and transpersonal terms, and that there is a continuum between the two poles. I myself sometimes speak of…

Read More

On Job and The Web of Existence

I recently read a great blog post by Matthew McCracken on Job and the evil that God brings upon him. Citing a commentary found on the AUFS blog, Matthew focuses on one verse in particular found in the prologue of Job: “…all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him.” It’s this “narrative concession”…

Read More

Generosity Should Hurt a Little

They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything–all she had to live on.” – Mark 12:44 In the above verse, Jesus is basically defining generosity by examining the effect the gift had on the life of the giver. The gifts of the rich people were meaningless in…

Read More

Who Was Jesus Not?

This post originally appeared as part of Toy Adams’ Imaging Jesus Advent Series. Go check out the rest of the great submissions. … I’m not a huge fan of the gnostic Christian sects that existed in the early centuries–you know, the kind that were “silenced” by the rest of orthodox christianity. I say I’m not…

Read More

What is a “Person?”

This is a comment I left on Tony Jones’ blog a while back when he posed the questions: what is a “person?” Warning: I quote John Cobb (no surprise there). What is a “person?” Well, let’s start small. Multicellular organisms can loosely be divided into two categories: One type establishes order among cells through their…

Read More

Thoughts on Evil, or The Lack Thereof.

Introduction First, a confession: I view nature as being full of indestructible polarities. They’re everywhere. Things like positive/negative, male/female, competition/corporation, chaos/order, are all examples of these type of naturally occurring complementary pairs. Further, I really like when Integral Philosophers like Steve McIntosh talk about the dialectic advance of Evolution in which the two polarities are…

Read More