Two Stories About Alexandria in Light of the Higgs Boson

Let me tell you two stories about Alexandria, Egypt, or more accurately, the same story from two perspectives. I say they're the same story because it's hard to tell from the narrative itself: In the middle of the 3rd century, St Anthony heard the voice of God and he went into the desert recesses to …

Catholicity

The definition of "catholic" is, "the church anywhere is the church everywhere." But here's a more poetic way of saying it. You are not a single drop of water in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a single drop of water. Written by Rumi, a 13th cent Sufi mystic poet. My one caveat …

Reductio Ad Hitlerum

I recently listened to the Tuesday, 9/9/2014 episode of The Gist, a podcast hosted by Mike Peska entitled Reductio Ad Hitlerum. (It was such a good title I decided to plagiarize it.) In this episode he interviewed Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. The book is evidently …

Is the Christian Life All About Knowing God?

My brother called me a couple of months ago and asked, "What is Gnosticism?" Well, that's an open-ended question, given the diffuse character of the Gnostic mindset, and so I gave a rather diffuse and open-ended answer. I should have questioned him further because it turns out that a speaker at his church had accused …