Joseph Minich
In Part 1 of this essay, I argued that Christians have an interest in cultivating public sites of theological negotiation and persuasion in precisely those locations where a critical mass of human wondering suggests the need. The free appropriation of orthodoxy (“confession” is always a task in the present-tense) and knowing where maturity is demanded […]
“Whatever is not from faith is sin,” Paul wrote (Rom. 14:23). While speaking about secondary truths in context, implicit in the Protestant project is the conviction that Paul’s statement applies to primary truths as well. The conscience, due to the necessity of making individual judgments, straddles all classes of truth. And the wisdom of Paul […]
We end where most of us begin, wondering how the mind of man can become persuaded of the truth that God exists. We implicitly initiated this journey (at the beginning of the series) by clarifying the nature of the term “God” and the nature of the term “existence,” and then we continued to look at […]
In my previous post , I took up the question of God’s beauty. In this penultimate post, we move to the question of God’s goodness. If the question of beauty takes the form of worrying that God is a killjoy, the question of goodness worries that God is a killer simpliciter. Not only is His […]
The question of God confronts the whole of man. It is a question that is partially resolved through the mind arriving at its truth, and partially resolved through the will arriving at its goodness. It is technically possible, of course, for the mind to recognize as true what the will considers undesirable. But especially in […]
In those moments where we might be caught questioning God’s existence, we often have an instinct that the most obvious procedure is an intellectual one. We need to find a pile of data that either proves or fails to prove God. One clever strategy, of course, is to simply claim that God is the primary […]
Having discussed the phenomenon of divine absence, and given some account of that phenomenon, we are now in a place to respond to divine absence in its contemporary form. If the argument of my previous essay has purchase, then many people within the late modern West will inevitably tend to have some doubts about God’s […]
In the previous essay, I introduced the problem of divine absence. That is, why does God, who should presumably be obvious, seem so much less obvious than we might hope for Him to be? Or recalling Taylor’s set-up, why is it that it was virtually impossible not to believe in God in 1500 AD, and […]
Most Christians who enjoy a healthy life of the mind have some acquaintance with doubt. It is not always very pronounced, and perhaps some get over it entirely. But for the majority of us mortals, occasional bouts of doubt (sometimes substantial) remain a stubborn feature of religious life. Occasionally, there is an attempt to dignify […]
Having clarified what we’re really asking when we ask if God exists, some may understandably be concerned that we risk replacing the God of Abraham with the God of the philosophers. That is to say, once the decision is made to wed biblical and philosophical descriptions of God, the inevitable result is that all the […]
In the previous post, I discussed how modern people tend to think of God as something like the “first gear” in the cosmic series of gears. This gestures toward a truth, but one has more closely approximated the classical vision of God when we see that God is that in virtue of which there is […]
Modernity, Pluralism, and Doubt Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Charles Taylor’s monumental A Secular Age was the simple observation that modern believers and unbelievers experience the world in much the same way. Whether raised by a homeschooling family who taught you to be a six-day creationist, or the child of an irreligious couple in San […]
Modernity is an era of exposure. How so? In a context where the ancient paths must be chosen—where the world around us will not reinforce them—any relation to those paths will share in the pathologies that attend human willing. This is not to deny, of course, that civilization itself cannot mediate pathology. Indeed it has […]
“I am I and my circumstance,” Ortega was fond of saying. And resisting the cultural forces that threaten to drag our civilization to the death of a fixed tribalism – I previously claimed – requires some reading of our circumstance. This is true for all Christians. Minimally, Christians can be confident that our ultimate enemies […]
Almost 40% of young Millennials are religiously unaffiliated (2). But, argues Tara Isabella Burton, this does not mean that they are not religious. The latter is not a particularly remarkable claim, of course. Many books have been written about post-Christian Western spirituality, and even about the “religion” of the godless. It would be a shame […]
