Posted in faith on 1 December 2006 | 6 Comments »
A recent comment has got me thinking about what kind of rules or guidelines should govern a genuine dialogue. This blog has occasionally been the site of some fairly ‘fervent disagreement’ and this makes me wonder about what it means to talk about differing ideas in a responsible or ethical way.
One of my own [...]
Posted in atheism, faith on 28 November 2006 | 7 Comments »
Here’s some follow-up reading on the resurgence of atheist literary output in recent months. The commentator is NY Times editorialist Richard Shweder and the title is ‘Atheists Agonistes‘ (’agonistes’ is a term that refers to ‘the struggler’ or ‘the combatant’), a thoughtful musing on the some potential root causes of the revival. Here [...]
Posted in atheism, faith on 15 November 2006 | 10 Comments »
Well Time Magazine has dove headfirst into a topic that always generates a lot of heat and (occasionally) a bit of light. “God vs. Science,” the latest cover story, takes the form of a debate between the atheist philosopher Richard Dawkins, author of the recent bestseller The God Delusion, and Francis Collins, director [...]
Posted in faith, pluralism on 8 November 2006 | 8 Comments »
The last of Volf’s four elements of a ‘functional faith’ is meaning and this completes his portrait of what a healthy faith looks like. This is, in my opinion, the most basic and fundamental of faith’s functions. When faith is operating according to its design it is helping us to understand and [...]
Posted in faith, politics on 3 November 2006 | 1 Comment »
I have previously referred to Greg Boyd’s efforts at challenging some prevailing assumptions about what evangelicalism looks like with respect to political issues so I was interested in a recent debate (or discussion) he participated in with Jim Wallis, a prominent Christian social activist. Both have serious questions about the way in which the [...]
Posted in faith, pluralism on 2 November 2006 | No Comments »
Returning to Volf’s conception of what a ‘functional faith’ looks like it is important to note that, in his opinion, much of contemporary North American Christianity never gets past the first two features: blessing and deliverance. We either view faith as some kind of performance-enhancing drug or we use it as a crutch so [...]
Posted in faith, pluralism on 27 October 2006 | 1 Comment »
The second positive ‘function’ that faith can have (when it’s operating properly) is that of deliverance. Here Volf pointed out the basic reality that most of us struggle to find ways to deal with failure and disappointment in our lives. Faith in God functions in that it gives us ways of both understanding [...]
Posted in faith, pluralism on 24 October 2006 | 6 Comments »
So if faith is malfunctioning when it leans toward either idleness or coerciveness, what is the proper role of faith in contemporary life? Volf wrapped up his lectures by summarizing four key areas where faith can contribute to what he called a ‘counter-culture for the common good’. (I always find it [...]
Posted in faith, pluralism on 23 October 2006 | 4 Comments »
Interesting article in the October 9 edition of Time Magazine on how ’spiritual doubt’ could be the key to defusing tensions between the rival fundamentalisms of East and West. Andrew Sullivan’s ‘When Not Seeing is Believing‘ is an argument for a greater humility in terms of what can be known about God and a [...]
Posted in faith, pluralism on 18 October 2006 | 10 Comments »
The other prominent sign that faith is malfunctioning, according to Volf, is an effort to combine it with force, whether that force is used to make others ‘convert’ or whether it involves a concerted effort to make society look more Christian. This, he argues, is a misunderstanding of what faith actually is.
So many [...]
