SmokeSound

How do we know what is true? We get too close to the fire. We skate out onto the thin ice. We plant potatoes when the moon is full and see how they grow. We eat raw chicken. We try putting the cart before the horse, and put a dead fish in the ground beneath the corn seeds. We get an idea, and give it a try, taste it, test it, and if it works, fine! If not, we try to think of what to change, or to substitute, or of another way to do things. We are more cautious, now, about what we put in our mouths to taste, but that is still essentially what we do. A scientist might say we form a hypothesis, a supposition, a what-if?  Then we try that. The fundamental logic of science is to doubt whatever proposition is made, not because we want to be contrary, but to learn just how good the idea is.  A really good idea will stand up to scrutiny, and what we want are really good ideas. Another way of saying that is to say that every hypothesis is tested by asking what woul...

They are still at it in Dayton, Tennessee. When I co-taught a course called, "Ever Since Darwin", we used to show the original "Inherit the Wind" movie, not because it was entirely accurate, but because it did capture something that is true about fundamentalist religion and its inability to accept what science knows to be true about human origins. John Scopes was a 24-year-old teacher in Dayton, who was put on trial for teaching evolution, and William Jennings Bryan, a hugely popular politician, was the prosecuting attorney.  Scopes was convicted, and fined $100.  Not even the famous defense attorney, Clarence Darrow could overcome the Tennessee law that forbade teaching evolution or any other theory that denied the biblical account of human origins.  It was, then in 1925, called "The Trial of the Century". Bryan College was founded in Dayton, Tennessee five years later, and in today's New York Times, is reported to be putting its own faculty ...

Let us begin by saying that although what many ancient people called,  "the good, and the true, and the beautiful", may not be a perfect description of fundamental human interests, they are a wonderful way to think about what lures us.  I think that, of all places I most desire, that place where truth and beauty and goodness come together--where each is uncompromised by the full presence of the others--is most satisfying.  That is to say, for instance, that what we find beautiful does not require compromising what we know to be true; that what we find to be true is not in tension with what we believe is good; that what entrances us with its sheer goodness shines with beauty. It is a kind of harmony. I do not hear music when I walk in the woods--I hear chirping and leaves brushing each other--nor, when I hear a woman laugh or a child giggle, do I slip off into an episode of truth-seeking, and I do not sit under chrome-plated pyramid contraptions and wonder whether m...

[The theological seminary I attended issued a general invitation to its constituents--or at least to a lot of us--to suggest how the education for its students might be improved.  I responded, in light of my own experience, which included finally leaving the church.  I have not yet heard from them, so with the deletion of introductory remarks, and names, here it is:  you might be more interested than they are.] I am a graduate of PLTS, for six years the pastor of a church, the recipient of a Ph.D. in theology, and an emeritus faculty member of a college of the church.  I am no longer a member of any church, and it is with that experience and conviction that I am responding to your open invitation to say something about how theological education needs to change.   I concede, without objection, if the suggestion is made that I do not have the right to suggest what a theological education ought to be because I have given up on the enterprise.  I cont...

There is nothing like a little inclement weather to brighten up a kid's life; make him tough, and provide grist for old-age, age-old stories about how brutal life was when they were young.  So we put Jao in his plastic turtle, hand him the hose, and pour another drink for ourselves. I would launch into a little dissertation, here, about global warming and how that affects weather, but Jao is not interested in the fact that the only water flowing in the bed of the Santa Cruz River has already been used, and will not see the ocean, again, for millenia.  All he wants is just a little more than I have in my glass, although, to be sure, he encourages me to regular refills.  It helps both of us to forget about dessication.  

 This is to ask your help in identifying what kind of birds these are. I had about a quart of bird seed left in a Home Depot bucket and, thinking it would be more convenient for me, I left it outside the fenced-in area of our yard.  As you can see, a small, hairy, migrating flock of low-flying birds took it upon themselves to roll the bucket down the hill and eat breakfast. There were about ten of them, and had I ten buckets, all of them would have had breakfast. Eventually, the bucket was abandoned much farther away from the house in a patch of prickly pear cactus. All I know for certain about these seed-eating, orange-headed critters is that they have been around for about 32 million years, which explains both their graying feathers and that they are older than the creation itself, by about 32 million years.

I come, absolutely by chance, from a western European religious tradition. I did not choose it, nor did it choose me:  it just happened that way. Our father, born in Norway, was a Lutheran, but he was an angry man, so he was angry with Lutherans, too, because they were there. His special form of revenge was to listen to fundamentalist idiots on the radio. Our mother was a daughter of people born in Norway, so she was a Lutheran, too, but she wasn't angry:  she just ought to have been so. Instead, she learned to play the pump organ slowly, just to keep the hymns from getting out of hand. I was pushed by chance and perverse good intentions, into thinking about becoming a Lutheran pastor; not by my parents, but by the solemn souls who provided Sunday School materials from the same people who supported the radio broadcasts our dad listened to:  good, turtle-talking stuff: a mechanic's view of creation, a bloodthirsty view of redemption, and a dismal view of ...

Florida is the flattest State in the USA. I am speaking of geographical elevations, here, not of intelligence, although I am not certain of that. After all, Senator Marco Rubio is from Florida. The lowest point in Florida is the sea. I am still speaking of geography, although. . . . The highest point in Florida is 345 feet above sea level, which is rather like standing a football field on end, goal posts, and end zones, and all. Most of Florida is more interested in football than global warming. My suspicion is that deep in his heart--about a foot down-- Mr. Rubio know that the sea is already rising, and that the ice at the other ends of the world is melting, and that when it melts it will kind of slip up over Florida. Senator Rubio probably knows that, but he knows something else, too. He knows that the next important election is only two years away. Ice, and melted ice, moves much slower. Florida has more to lose than almost anybody except the people who live o...

Billy, a former dentist, strolled by the backstop, coming back from first base, and pretended to be speaking to no one: "Why are we here?", he asks. "Why are we really here?" He does not mean, Why are we playing baseball? He is playing a different game. He has been reading, again. This time it sounds like Martin Heidegger. Once it was the Prisoner's Dilemma. Another time, the God Particle, and polarized light from the Big Bang. Neither one of us is smart enough to understand what those things are, but both of us are as curious as kids about what they are. We ask each other just to ascertain that we are not alone in our ignorance. When we solve those problems, we are going to turn to the Infield Fly Rule. It would be wrong to say that the guys come to Udall Park to talk about particle physics or to contemplate the meaning of light, and life. They come to play baseball. But shit happens, you know: protons collide, and cancer eats at you....

 Daniel and Ellie came to visit, perhaps just to thaw out after a winter in Minneapolis, before they get married this summer in Madison, and before they return to Portland, Oregon, where they plan to settle back into the liquid life of a coastal climate. We picked them up in Phoenix, and went straight to Sedona:  Red Rock Country in Arizona.  It just seemed right to us that we--two generations of tumbling family--should together see the place where John McCain vetted, and abetted, and pirouetted Sarah Palin's career, before he turned her loose on a shopping trip for clothes and a career in inanity. (Don't look for a picture of Sedona, here:  nothing I carried in my pockets was adequate to capture what Sedona is.  "God may have created the Grand Canyon," we read, "but he lives in Sedona." Jerome used to be called a Ghost Town, but that was before almost every inch of the almost-cliffside mining town was bought by people who could not afford to live in ...