Undeception

Going into this post, please be aware that I will indulge in the obnoxious habit of capitalizing Truth to distinguish the abstract concept of veritas from small-t truths that amount to individual factoids. I hope this will not distract you.

As a teenager I was once informed by a mentor that I was a “seeker of Truth.” This was a defining moment for me, not because it changed my behavior, but because it made me startlingly aware of this behavior. I have proudly owned that badge ever since, although I do generally try to keep it under my coat so as not to annoy people. This blog has been a workshop for me in my continuing mission to search for Truth, especially in places considered unlikely by others who shared my upbringing.

In the last year, however, something has changed. It’s not that I value Truth less; it’s just that I have behaved less and less as though it were my sacred calling to fight for Truth. One of the truths I have seen confirmed again and again over the last several years is that no one, not even inveterate Truth-seekers, have a monopoly on it. The greatest threat to Truth comes from those whose confidence that they have it lead them to root out everyone making a counter-claim. This conviction puts me on a collision course with heresy hunters, who in the name of defending the Truth of God have crammed it so tightly into a cage that I can scarcely imagine their having any real affection for it.

Here’s another lesson that I have been learning over the last several, quiet months, which I’ve just now figured out how to articulate: Truth doesn’t need my protection. It is larger than I am. I am not its steward; instead, I am responsible for my own character — my own actions and reactions. I can and should promote what I think is true and show what is false for what it is, with discretion and all due diligence in determining it, of course. But primarily, I am called to follow Christ, subjecting my will to the service of God and others. By far the best and most important way to serve Truth is by acting like we believe it, viz. through obedience to what we believe. I believe that the highest, most elusive truth of the universe is Love — so if my life is not characterized by Love-seeking, how can I pretend to be a Truth-seeker?

Watching the biblioblogosphere as closely as I have for the last couple of years, I’ve seen and participated in far too many ugly wars for Truth. Bitter, dismissive, and insulting diatribes put into defense of beliefs are not a bit more common among the heresy-hunting Fundamentalist types than it is the enlightened who embrace doubt and uncertainty. Friends, Truth is a sword meant to hew through the brambles of untruths, not the people trapped behind them.

If I can’t act in love during my tousles for Truth, treating the other person as a child of God no matter how obviously, infuriatingly ignorant they are, then what I am upholding and defending is not Truth but my own pet truths, factoids that I cognitively assent to, at the expense of the greatest truth I know. There is nothing more false than conflating my truth with the Truth.

I forsee the objection that impassioned debates are often necessary to ferret out the facts; besides, didn’t Jesus himself use angry words and call his opponents on the carpet? Indeed he did. But he also told us, “Be angry, and sin not.” This tells me, until you’re righteous, don’t feign righteous anger. Righteous anger is so hard to distinguish from the unrighteous kind; this ambiguity is a caution against blowing up in defense of our rightness. We need to remember what we’re fighting for.

You see, fighting for Truth so often treats it as a trophy to be won, a public reward for our diligent Truth-seeking. I want to get out of this closed circuit of seeking Truth for seeking Truth’s sake. If we don’t live up to the light we do have – and I hope we can all agree that living a life characterized by loving humility qualifies – no matter how accurately and convincingly we argue for truths, we are not lovers of Truth.

The old meaning of the adjective true, seldom used these days, was faithful; actually, that meaning is still around in our usage of it in the sense of faithfulness to reality. The Truth I seek is a more robust form of faithfulness than that: faithfulness to God even more than faithfulness to reality, which we can hardly claim to know with any certainty anyway. I want to be much more than a Truth seeker; I want to be a Truth lover. Even if I miss truths here and there, and even though I recognize that I’ll never obtain certainty in this world, Truth will continue to be my ideal and the template I use to shape my character.

If I mistake, he will forgive me. I do not fear him; I fear only lest, able to see and write these things, I should fail of witnessing, and myself be, after all, a castaway—no king, but a talker; no disciple of Jesus, ready to go with him to the death, but an arguer about the truth; a hater of the lies men speak for God, and myself a truth-speaking liar, not a doer of the word.

G. MacDonald

The subtle, silent epiphany of the last several months has been that what I must seek first is not truths – disembodied facts and undeceptions – but righteousness. One of the most profound undeceptions I’ve undergone is the realization that righteousness is not some legal decree that magically covers and converts my own rancid attitudes and actions. It’s not that simple at all. Being a true Christian in the deepest sense of that word (maybe I should capitalize it) is hard work. But the real dirty work of Christianity is not in controlling our actions, but our re-actions: how we respond to problems such as getting cut off in traffic, how we deal with those who are hurting those we love, and how we treat defenders of patent falsehoods. Seeking Truth is not enough; we must be true.

God give me a true heart.

What in the world am I trying to do with this site? Who am I writing for? Who do I expect to come away with something of value?

I ask myself these questions periodically. Am I a “faith” blogger or a “skeptic” blogger? The posts I write criticizing aspects of evangelicalism are the most popular, and are quite common given that those beliefs are most often the object of my own undeception; on the other hand, I make no bones about my own abiding faith. Yet in observing those who encounter difficulties with the Bible, especially in the blogosphere, it seems things too often go in two diametrically opposed directions:

• The Disillusioned: The Bible is acknowledged to have deep flaws. Discussion develops around criticizing the Bible’s flaws and sneering at the inanities of Christians who deny them.
• The Defenders: The Bible is perfect. Any discussion of alleged flaws in it is stolidly defensive; more often, it is outsourced to apologists.

From there both camps trudge along their separate, well-worn paths. Typically the more bitter of the Disillusioned become the Deconverted. I come across many deconversion blogs, which isn’t surprising considering that disillusionment and deconversion are so emotionally repercussive. Their communities and survivors’ groups form very easily, commenting and linking to one another as a form of mutual support.

There are plenty of blogs by those militantly confident in their Christianity as well; the Defenders remain happy where they are…at all costs, seemingly.

Comparing the content of the blogs from those groups to mine, you’d see many more affinities between me and the Disillusioned. Indeed, because I spend so much time discussing the deep flaws in the Bible and in the forms of Christianity championed by the Defenders, my blog attracts mostly the Disillusioned and the Deconverted. But I do not count myself among either group. Rather, I am a part of an increasing number of believers no longer confident in either the pat answers of the apologists or the knee-jerk reactions of the self-styled enemies of Christianity. Even upon realization that our pursuit of God and His truth does not terminate in Scripture or systematic theologies, we do not find enough grounds to repudiate that pursuit.

I know that both the Defenders and the Disillusioned/Deconverted would consider me and the growing numbers of people like me to be living in an untenable state of cognitive dissonance. They would say I am the unreasonable, illusioned defender, denying the fruits of the doubts and disbelief I have uncovered and at times trumpeted. Their premise is that without an inerrant Bible that tells us exactly what to believe we have no good reason to believe in anything resembling the God of the Bible. I reject this premise as reactionary as I rest hopeful in a conviction that a good God, and one that bears more than a coincidental and passing resemblance to the God the Christians have always worshiped, actually exists. Why is this?

Please do not think that I offer the following as any sort of philosophical treatise, but as a statement of my current stance given my own analysis, based on my own experience, constantly and repeatedly judged against the various philosophical ideas I encounter in my reading. Crucially, none of it is proof: in a universe in which proof is impossible, we are all, to a person, left choosing what to believe.

I believe in God because I believe in goodness; I believe in God because I believe in beauty; I believe in God because I believe in justice; I believe in God because I believe in non-arbitrary meaning. I choose to believe in these absolutes not because of proof, of which there is none, or because of overwhelming evidence, of which there is precious little; I realize that it could just as well be that there is evil, ugliness, injustice, and/or chaos at the bottom of the universe. But I will not worship those things, even as far as to grant their absolute existence or entertain the notion that they will have the final victory. I will worship what is good and right and lovely, and grant it all the honor of believing in and even worshiping its absolute existence as the Ultimate. We are disappointed to have seen those ideal virtues violated or at least imperfectly modeled in other people; it makes sense that this is in part because there is actually a Person in whom those virtues are embodied perfectly. I find that the God of Christianity coincides with these expectations to my satisfaction.

I cannot help being convinced that certain absolute ideal principles exist regardless of any prevailing cultural sensibilities. Loving concern for a child: always right. Torturing a child: always wrong. Looking out for the interests of women: always right. Raping a woman: always wrong. Showing honor to an honest man: always right. Slandering an honest man: always wrong. These evaluations are grounded in the existence and primacy of Goodness. Evil – what shouldn’t be – doesn’t have an independent existence, but is an often quite palpable negation of what is good – what should be. The question inevitably comes: why is there any negation of should-be? Isn’t that reason enough to doubt such a thing as a should-be?

Another attribute of the Ultimate that I did not mention is also responsible for my continuing faith: it is mystery, the consort of the Ultimate’s transcendence. It is that which does not allow me to declare with as much certainty as I would like that those ideals I place my hope in truly exist; it is what does not allow me to conclude that the existence of evil, ugliness, injustice, and chaos in this world is a defeater of my hope in goodness, beauty, justice, and meaning; worst of all, it necessitates the humility that we as humans resist to the bitter end. But unlike those other attributes, mystery is not eternal: my Christian hope is in the eventual resolution of this mystery/transcendence, the closing of the gap between heaven and earth, the eventual elimination of shouldn’t-be from the midst of should-be. And it is this hope that I lay down before the perfect object of my worship, the one of whom I have been fathered from a young age and who has given me peace and joy to spare, but more importantly, a deep-seated concern and empathy for others.

There are many who imagine that they are caught up somewhere above the mystery into the very certainty of God. Doubt, which may be thought of as an intentional filling of one’s lungs with the air of mystery, is thought by these to be a denial of the God whom they have experienced. This is how certainty is achieved for the Defenders.

There are also many who can no longer pretend that they are experiencing the certainties promised them beyond that yawning gap of mystery; these are often troubled, hurting, and angry by this revelation. It seems only natural that those in the painful throes of the transcendence of God, mistaking it for His absence, cling to the firm ground and renounce all else. This is how certainty is achieved for the Disillusioned.

And then there are some of us who seek to keep our feet planted in reality, unflinchingly seeking out truths that the Defenders disavow, but who, inhaling the mystery, strain to reach that transcendent-yet-imminent Goodness of which we catch vivid glimpses. We deny that certainty is anything but an illusion. Our faith is not about maintaining beliefs, but about fervently striving to bring the Goodness we have known closer to the waiting world. While valuing the insights into the human and divine natures the biblical authors have to offer us, and while humbly and thoroughly subjecting those insights to all of the reconstructions and deconstructions suggested by critical inquiry, we do not lean on either understanding. We trust instead in the God for whom our souls yearn and without whom all the truths on the earth would be nothing more than clanging cymbals. Our faith is realized in an ethic intended to make those virtues manifest in our own lives, for the sake of others: we demonstrate our hope for the victory of love by acting faithfully, seeking to embody goodness, beauty, justice, meaning, and above all, Love. This is what we call serving God. We are Christians because we were – and are – taught these things by Jesus.

I’m not trying to pigeon-hole every human into these few categories. There are many others: most people are happily oblivious to all these debates; others are well aware of the debates, but have become fatigued and battle-weary, wanting to hope but struggling to find the will to wade through the divide between the different dogmatic positions. I hope to have something useful to say to those in both of those categories without becoming an obnoxious crusader. Although at times my temper has no doubt flared against certain egregious examples of problematic thinking among the groups I’ve described, I do not want to demonize anyone. I write this blog to offer another way of dealing with doubts, one which has the potential to heal the often bitter and vitriolic gash separating the Defenders and the bitter Disillusioned, for the sake especially of those caught in the middle. My hope is that by sharing my search for truth on this blog, stripping away what is false and shoring up what is true, I will eventually help motivate all, whether Christian, heretic, or apostate, who share the ethic of an overcoming goodness that I call Christianity in action.

“Thou doubtest because thou lovest the truth. Some would willingly believe life but a phantasm, if only it might for ever afford them a world of pleasant dreams: thou art not of such! Be content for a while not to know surely. The hour will come, and that ere long, when, being true, thou shalt behold the very truth, and doubt will be forever dead. Scarce, then, wilt thou be able to recall the features of the phantom. Thou wilt then know that which thou canst not now dream. Thou hast not yet looked the Truth in the face, hast as yet at best but seen him through a cloud. That which thou seest not, and never didst see save in a glass darkly – that which, indeed, never can be known save by its innate splendour shining straight into pure eyes – that thou canst not but doubt, and art blameless in doubting until thou seest it face to face, when thou wilt no longer be able to doubt it. But to him who has once seen even a shadow only of the truth, and, even but hoping he has seen it when it is present no longer, tries to obey it – to him the real vision, the Truth himself, will come, and depart no more, but abide with him for ever.”

by George MacDonald
from Lilith

H/T Dover Beach

(paraphrase below the fold)

Continue Reading →

This is a post in response to a blog that does not allow comments. I’d have preferred to have this discussion over there, but here we are.

Over at The Boar’s Head Tavern, the Fearsome Tycoon attempts to apply an argumentum ad consequentiam in reductio ad absurdum’s clothing to a statement in my last post on homosexuality. I wrote:

A growing number of Christians are finding it harder and harder to believe that God has a fundamental problem with homosexuality, even when they do not accept it as ideal.

He proffers these substitutions to show why I’m wrong:

A growing number of Christians are finding it harder and harder to believe that God has a fundamental problem with cohabiting before marriage, even when they do not accept it as ideal.

A growing number of Christians are finding it harder and harder to believe that God has a fundamental problem with divorcing your spouse to marry your true love, even when they do not accept it as ideal.

A growing number of Christians are finding it harder and harder to believe that God has a fundamental problem with not believing in the Virgin Birth, even when they do not accept it as ideal.

Note the implication that no one may begin to disbelieve anything that he accepts as axiomatic without the whole thing going to hell (literally).

He seems to infer from my statement that I think we should believe whatever it is a growing number of Christians believe. To this I say, You may be in a tavern, but get your face out of the mug, sir! Even a cursory glance through my post shows that I do not argue this or anything like it. He mistakes his own error for my own: unlike he apparently does, I do not assume that acceptance by “the right” people (be they “a growing number of Christians”, an historic council, or whomever) is determinative of the truth itself.

The following statement from his post illustrates what I mean, indicating that he digested very little of the rest of my post:

If the teachings of Christ and the commands of God don’t matter for church fellowship, then nothing does.

It appears he decided not to take me up on my suggestion to step and back and at least pretend that he could be wrong in his interpretations. The entire point of my post was that what precisely constitutes “the teachings of Christ and the commands of God” is not something we can blithely assume to be settled, indisputable, and equivalent to what we already happen to believe. This is not to say that we can’t be confident of our current beliefs but that a truly humble spirit will keep the hair-trigger heresy gun in the holster.

At one point he does indicate that he heard my point about being patient with people who have other interpretations of Scripture; it seems he just decides he’s not too keen on the idea. He sarcastically remarks that those of us who recognize that the Bible isn’t crystal clear on every important point “have decided that God didn’t really teach much we could understand, and so most of what what we believe and practice is just stuff we made up.” The reason he disagrees with this is not stated, but the thing that’s so irksome about this sort of objection is the myopic logic, “God teaches things clearly; therefore, whatever I think is clear is what God teaches.” That logic, and the assumption that “perspicuity” is a right for all believers guaranteed by God, reminds me of a statement I’ve quoted on this blog before. Ironically it comes from the very man the Boar’s Head Tavern claims as its “patron saint”: C. S. Lewis.

To a human mind this working-up (in a sense imperfectly), this sublimation (incomplete) of human material, seems, no doubt, an untidy and leaky vehicle. We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form–something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table. One can respect, and at moments envy, both the Fundamentalists’ view of the Bible and the Roman Catholics view of the Church. But there is one argument which we should beware of using for either position: God must have done what is best, this is best, therefore God has done this. For we are mortals and do not know what is best for us, and it is dangerous to prescribe what God must have done-especially when we cannot, for the life of us, see that He has after all done it.

We may observe that the teaching of Our Lord Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given us in that cut-and-dried, fool-proof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answer to questions, shaped in some degree by their context. And when we have collected them all we cannot reduce them to a system. He preaches but He does not lecture. He uses paradox, proverb, exaggeration, parable, irony; even (I mean no irreverence) the “wise-crack”. He utters maxims which, like popular proverbs, if rigorously taken, may seem to contradict one another. His teaching therefore cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, cannot be “got up” as if it were a “subject”. If we try to do that with it, we shall find Him the most elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question. He will not be, in the way we want, “pinned down”. The attempt is (again, I mean no irreverence) like trying to bottle a sunbeam.

Lack of certainty can be a real pain, but I’d rather put up with less certainty about even things that are absolutely true than blow full-steam ahead into a presumption of the correctness of my tradition’s interpretations without the humility that God expects.

Two misconceptions I’d like to clear up. First, I was not personally arguing that capitalism was equivalent to the sin of Ananias and Sapphira, just as I was not campaigning against women in ministry or charging interest: I was playing devil’s advocate, and I’m sure I didn’t make the best biblical case against capitalism. My point remains: there are those who find ample biblical grounds for condemning capitalism.

Next, it was stated that my argument “basically boils down to, ‘If you’re born that way, we can’t possibly tell you not to have sex.’ ” I never mentioned celibacy or not: saying that someone can be a homosexual and a Christian doesn’t itself argue (and at very least, my post never even insinuated) that “free love” or cohabitation is acceptable. An acknowledgment of the fact that some homosexuals are participants in the Christian faith is no more an “argument” against celibacy than acknowledging the fact that some heterosexuals are participants in the Christian faith.

But because the Fearsome Tycoon does not suffer from uncertainty about his doctrines, he proclaims that he’d have no trouble ruling out fellowship with anyone who disagrees with him on the subject of when the Sabbath should be observed, whether charging interest is an acceptable practice, whether socialism or capitalism is preferable, or whether women can be in ministry. Still, I extend the right hand of Christian fellowship to the Fearsome Tycoon, even though he’s given every indication that he’ll consider reciprocation tantamount to accepting sexual promiscuity, divorce, and a denial of the Virgin Birth.

Sheesh. Maybe there’s a reason he hangs out at a tavern with that particular name.

Our model for intrafaith dialogue?

“Do not confuse questions with doubts. Doubts go with certainty: if you make the mistake of being certain, you can have a doubt. Questions are part of the ongoing process of life.”
– John Dominic Crossan

H/T Mark Goodacre

I know, two “quote of the day” posts in a row. But this one, which I found in a biography of George MacDonald I bought and read as a teenager, was too good to pass up, and like the best quotes of the day, it needs no comment.

I cannot say I never doubt, nor until I hold the very heart of good as my very own in Him, can I wish not to doubt. For doubt is the hammer that breaks the windows clouded with human fancies, and lets in the pure light. But I do say that all my hope, all my joy, all my strength are in the Lord Christ and his Father; that all my theories of life and growth are rooted in him; that his truth is gradually clearing up the mysteries of this world.

George MacDonald

Since childhood, my personality has been marked by an undercurrent of a haunting yearning sometimes referred to in its extreme forms as “melancholy”, very much like what C. S. Lewis called “joy”. I have always chalked it up to my Scottish heritage, but I imagine a lot of other ethnicities (I’m thinking particularly of Russians) can claim the same. I’m not prone to depression or anything, but I’ve always been attracted to haunting music, mystical stories — anything that might be referred to as sad beauty.

It’s something I’d love to stir up in whichever of my children are like me. To that end, when I tuck my children in each night, I’ve begun to complement “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” and “Seek Ye First” with some old Scottish folk songs/ballads I know, such as “Loch Lomond” (stay with me — this is going somewhere):

By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes
Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomon’
Where me and my true love were ever wont to gae
On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomon’
Oh! ye’ll tak’ the high road and I’ll tak’ the low road
And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye
For me and my true love will never meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomon’.

The allusion to death is oblique enough there, isn’t it? But the sadness that’s there is made more potent by combination with such a beautiful Gaelic melody.

Another song whose melody I find absolutely mesmerizing is “Lowlands” (the version in a minor mode), an old sea shanty that evidently originated in the foreboding dreams of sailors long away at sea that they took as ill omens concerning their loved ones at home. “I dreamed a dream the other night/Lowlands! Lowlands away, my John/. . ./And then I knew my love was dead/My lowlands away.”

Then there’s Bonnie George Campbell:

Hie upon highlands and laigh upon tay
Bonnie George Campbell rode out on a day
He sadled, he bridled, and gallant rode he
And hame [i.e. home] cam his guid horse
But never cam he.

Of course, I won’t be singing any of the later verses that speak of the bloody saddle — at least not at bedtime! But the thought of doing so does remind me that people in older cultures gained an awareness of the gruesome nature of war much earlier and more vividly than we do with our sanitized and cartoonized versions.

I got to thinking about my early attraction to the bittersweet, my acknowledgement of the inevitability of hardship, and my love for humanity’s attempts to cope with sorrow through expression as in these songs, and not through suppression or denial. Indeed, in bygone days it was much harder to deny sorrow than it is in modern day America, where a broken arm is sometimes about the worst thing a child can imagine happening to someone. But when I compare myself with so many others in my religious tradition, I see a definite contrast.

The broad community of evangelical faith with which I am most familiar does not duly acknowledge sorrow and suffering. They regularly deny it and suppress it: this is evident in their contemporary Christian music stations advertising their wares as  ”positive, encouraging” music. I understand that they offer this as an alternative to hopeless, purposeless music that they find destructive; without hope, suffering can indeed be devastating, and wallowing in it is not going to help anyone. But what I find is that they actually miss out on engaging negative topics by offering stock slogans as their solution. Another evidence is that they’re suspicious of down-to-earth efforts at meeting needs, spurning social concern because they think that the black in this world is challengeable only by their white: the gospel.

Now, I do think there is relief for our personal struggles to be found in turning to God, but the impression given by so many of these believers – which they themselves seem to accept – is of a dramatic “before Jesus” and “after Jesus” photo that is not commonly fulfilled in a way relevant to most people’s life experiences. Many if not most of these believers end up in practice denying the potency of problems such as uncertainty, fear, and suffering rather than acknowledging them as mainstays of our existence with which we need help and for which we need to offer help beyond the formulae and platitudes. When they chalk up everything unpleasant to a Fall long eons ago it has the effect of filing it all away for a fix long eons away. Just “praise the Lord” and get on with it (where “it” means praising the Lord and trying to get others to.) The Ned Flanders stereotype came from somewhere, you know.

But the denial of problems doesn’t end there. In fact, it’s typified most obviously in the blind trust they place in the Bible and in their tradition’s interpretation of it. They steadfastly renounce all who would peel back the veneer for just a moment to admit that, by any reasonable definition, there are problems with their inerrant answer book; to do so would mean that they’d have to live in a world that’s not black and white. This is clearly intolerable.

This leads me to consider that there’s no coincidental correlation among those of us most mesmerized by haunting beauty and precious sorrow, those who truly come to grips with difficulties, suffering, and hardship as integral to the human experience and make the best of them, and those of us who are willing to grapple with a living faith as it exists in a grayscale world, with no hope for certainty, no inerrant guide to the world, and only a mystical inkling that, at bottom, things might really make sense after all.

All of this is closely intertwined with what Keats called “Negative Capability.” As Keats described it, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” he might be described as having negative capability. He associated it with great poets, for whom a deep-seated sense of beauty permeates all they do, such that beauty is evident, or even most evident, where there is pain. Negative capability is often used these days to explain someone who is content to find value in life even while embracing uncertainty in the most fundamental aspects of our existence, and who will be satisfied to enjoy the journey even when guaranteed no safe arrival.

Here I think we see another commonality between the atheists who suffer no exception to their rationalistic epistemology and conservative Christians who will countenance no challenge to their epistemology founded upon the divine perfection of Scripture. I could never be comfortable either place.

My thoughts turn yet again toward Abraham (regardless of questions of his historicity), whose patriarchy I claim. He was called out by a mysterious deity and followed Him with implicit trust from a familiar land to a strange land. God’s test of faith during the Mount Moriah incident should scandalize the conservative Christian because it consisted of challenging Abraham to trust Him even when it contradicted systematic theology. Keats described the great poets as the exemplars of negative capability for whom “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” The faith of Abraham was this: he never let Beauty leave his sight despite the changing scenery, uncertainty, doubts, and conflicting information he was given. I gladly call him Father Abraham.

I wonder what other correlations that can be drawn. For instance, I’ll bet that many of us who continue on our religious journey even after having our systematic faith exposed as a paper mâché bulwark are likely to be the type most enamored of fantasy and science fiction. Thoughts?