Daniel Taylor's Blog, page 5

GOD AND THE BRAIN—OR BRAIN GOD?

One of the real advantages of not professionally professing literature any longer is expanding my range of reading. I have decided to get just educated enough about brain research to be dangerous, hence my latest Amazon order: books on Flannery O’Connor, Emily Dickinson, and the relation between brain science, psychology, and religion.
I’ll report on the latter if I find the book interesting, but in the meantime I thought I’d stake out my pre-enlightenment position, just so I can show how much I’ve grown once the experts clue me in.
A lot ...

THE IMAGINARY VS THE IMAGINATIVE

I’m reading Alister McGrath’s new critical biography of C.S. Lewis (thanks to Mavis for the signed copy!). I was not sure that we needed another bio of Lewis, but am finding it useful and insightful because he engages Lewis’s writing more fully than the other bios, sort of a cross between “the facts” of earlier bios and the account of Lewis’s intellectual development in Alan Jacob’s The Narnian. I recommend it.
One of the ideas McGrath discusses is the distinction in Lewis between “imaginary” and “imaginative.” The imaginary is something “that ...

THEOLOGIANS, CORONERS, AND WORLD RELIGIONS

I think of good books as time bombs. They sit there in the stack ticking away, waiting patiently for you to pick them up so they can explode in your mind.
I finally picked up a book that I bought probably twenty years ago. It doesn’t rise to the level of a “good book,” but it was a useful one. It was about how Christianity should think about other religions. I give it credit for being very fair in laying out the various positions—from so-called “exclusivism” (I object to the term because ...

NOAH, MARILYNNE ROBINSON, AND DROWNING MOTHERS

I gave a talk yesterday, at the invitation of the Bethel University art and English departments, on Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping. I called her, for me, a “wow” writer, meaning that I find myself frequently pausing after reading a passage and saying, sometimes out loud, “wow.” Here is an example:
“In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realized the ramifications of certain of His laws, for example, that shock will expend itself in waves . . . . Cain became his children and their children and theirs, ...

The Skeptical Believer Lives!

I am happy to announce that the book I have been using as an excuse for not doing any profitable work the last few years is now available. The Skeptical Believer: Telling Stories to Your Inner Atheist is available on Amazon. To give you an idea of what it’s about, here is the material from the back cover:
Can someone be both skeptical and a believer? In what sense is having faith like living in a story? And what, for heaven’s sake, is an Inner Atheist?
These are just a few of ...

“You Can’t Prove That!”–“Woof”

In the season of Wise Men, I’d like to say a word in praise of Charles Schultz, philosopher-theologian-cartoonist and wise man.In one of the Peanuts cartoons, Linus is sitting in the pumpkin patch with Snoopy, the place Linus does his best thinking (and hoping). He asks Snoopy a question:
“What would you say if you were the only one in the world who believed something and everyone else thought you were crazy?”
Snoopy’s reply:
“Woof!”
I feel like that some days. Keenly aware that most of my views and values are minority views, and ...

FAITH AND SUSPENSE: LIVING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STORY

[Following is another excerpt from a book I'm finishing up, The Skeptical Believer: Telling Stories to Your Inner Atheist. (It will be available in January and I'll probably post if for free on this website.) The italicized words WITHIN parentheses is the voice of my Inner Atheist, who comments freely throughout the book on what I say. Non-italicized material within parentheses is plain old me speaking.]
 
We are always coming in on something that is already going on.
Eugene Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant
 
Wait for the Lord;
be strong and courageous
and wait for the ...

SUFFERING AS AN ARGUMENT FOR GOD

Just finished reading Andrea Palpant Dilley’s Faith and Other Flat Tires (Zondervan) and found a lot to like and ruminate on. (She’s a young writer, sort of a cross between Lauren Winner and Anne Lamott (on valium), without the book sales, as yet, of either.) One point she makes that I find interesting is that, for her, the fact of suffering seems more an argument for the existence of God than an argument against God. This is the opposite of what most, including defenders of God, have supposed over the ...

BURYING PAMELA

Okay, so I’ve been away from blogging for a few months. And all five of my readers have been depressed, waiting anxiously for me to return. (I’m counting my mother, who has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t own a computer, because she would certainly be supportive if she could just remember who I am. I’m also counting what I call “The Unknown Reader” because Google Analytics tells me I get the occasional hit from Russia or Uzbeckistan. What, you say that is undoubtedly a spammer? Well, a hit is a hit.)
BURYING PAMELA
Actually, ...

The Journey of the Soul in the Vale of Ordinariness

“I discover the holy . . . [by] peering under the edges of the ordinary.”
One of the great challenges of faith is wedding the spiritual to the ordinary. It’s not just the old matter of finding the transcendent within the immanent. That’s hard enough, but since the immanent world about us is often quite fascinating, the challenge is really greater than that. (Gerard Manley Hopkins saw God in the swooping hawk and the beautiful dappled things without any problem.)
I think the greater challenge is to see God in the humdrum ...