Schubert Ogden taught me this: Some resort to God-talk so that life can have meaning in the face of all setbacks. Others (like Ogden) resort to God-talk to articulate their continuing discovery that life somehow does have meaning in the face of [...]

General observation: The problem of evil is often presented as a theoretical problem (whether “logical” or “evidential”) for theists (those who affirm the reality of God). But there is a theoretical problem of evil only where there is a consensus on exactly [...]

What is Faith? Here are two answers I’ve heard: 1. Faith is believing what you’ve been told, period. (“X says it. I believe it. That settles it.” For “X” you can substitute “the Bible,” “the Nicene Creed,” “the Pope,” “the Prophet in [...]

For me, to believe in God is to awaken to reality as such as intimately all-enlivening, all-sustaining and all-embracing, enlivening not just me but all things, sustaining not just me but all things for as long as they continue, and embracing not [...]

[I wrote an earlier version of this, “Groaning Towards Compassion,” in 2005. It’s helpful to know that when I first wrote this I was experiencing a level of grief more intense than any I have suffered beforehand or afterwards—so far. What I [...]

“My beloved thrust his hand into the opening, and my insides ached for him. I arose to open to my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with liquid myrrh, upon the handles of the bolt” (Song of Solomon/Song of Songs [...]

Here’s a spiritual practice I commend. It’s very indebted to a popular practice known as centering prayer. But I find the word “centering” somewhat misleading. It seems to me that my Christian faith teaches that to center on God, or on Jesus, [...]

“God” isn’t exactly a pronoun, but like pronouns, the word has often functioned, at least partly, as an “indexical” term: “Indexicals are linguistic expressions whose reference shifts from context to context: some paradigm examples are ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘today’, ‘he’, ‘she’, and [...]

[This is for a course where some of Gordon Kaufman’s works have been assigned.] Gordon Kaufman eventually came to identify God “as the creativity manifest throughout the cosmos”—In the Beginning … Creativity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), p. 48. This certainly converges with [...]

I speak of God  with good reason when I awaken trustfully to manifestations of an ongoing dialogical relationship involving the uniquely all-inclusive reality* (God**) with all less inclusive realities.  These manifestations are moments of varying intensity where this dialogical relationship seems inescapably [...]