Abrahamic Traditions

Apr112019 by jrcowles1 Comment

Joy And The Absurd — A Meditation On Buridan’s Ass

"Life" Issues, Abrahamic Traditions, Advent, Atheism, autonomy, awareness, book review, C. S. Lewis, Challenge, Change, Character of God, Christianity, Christmas, contemplation, Creator, critical judgment, culture, December, existentialism, Ezra Pound, faith, God, Holy Mystery, Human Condition, Jim Cowles, Kierkegaard, Literature, Numinous, Religion, Secularity, Skeptic, Spirituality, T. S. Eliot, Theology, Thinking, Uncategorized

Full disclosure: as I have said elsewhere, I never got the “hang uv” being a Christian, and consider the multiple decades I spent beating my head against that particular brick wall as time merely pissed away. I still believe that. But that is only half the truth. The other half is that it is equally true that I could never get, have never gotten, the “hang uv” being an atheist. I am no more successful as a “creedal” atheist than I was as a “creedal” Christian. My admiration for, e.g., Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, Julia Sweeney, and Daniel Dennett is undiminished. Nothing I say in what follows should be interpreted as disagreeing with their contention that religious statements should be subject to the same critique as other statements. Religio

Mar212019 by jrcowlesNo Comments

Mortality, Melatonin, And Mystery

"Life" Issues, Abrahamic Traditions, Archetypes, autonomy, awareness, Buddhism, Challenge, Change, Character of God, Christianity, Church, Compassion, contemplation, Cosmology, Creation, critical judgment, culture, doubt, Enlightenment, Epiphany, faith, faithfulness, Four Quartets, God, Holy Mystery, Holy Week, Hope, Ideology, inner peace, Longing, Love, mindfulness, Numinous, Rationality, relationships, Religion, Secularity, Skeptic, The Divine, Uncategorized, Waiting, Wholeness

As someone who is moving into the outer fringes of what we may reasonably call “old age” – I will be 70 on 5 April 2019 – I have already learned some valuable lessons, all of which will apply to some and some of which will apply to all. For whatever it may be worth, the following is what I have learned so far. Pick and choose the lessons that are relevant to you. o Old age need not advance gradually With me, I began to move into the exurbs of old age in a single week, perhaps even a briefer time than that. In late August of 2012, I was returning from a 3-week trip to Wichita, KS, to see relatives, what few I have left in my family of origin. I was jammed into the back seat, just forward of the tailcone, of a small Embraer jet on a flight to Denver to make connections

Mar72019 by jrcowlesNo Comments

“Not With A Bang But A Whimper” — The Glamp Of The Saints

Abrahamic Traditions, activism, autonomy, awareness, bible, bigotry, book review, Challenge, Change, Character of God, Christianity, Church, citizenship, conflict, conservatism, constitution, contemplation, courage, Creation, critical judgment, culture, Current Events, Discernment, election year, Enlightenment, Fascism, Fear, Food, hate, Hospitality, Human Condition, hunger, Ideology, immigration, injustice, Jean Raspail, Minorities, multiculturalism, Nihilism, Pain and Suffering, postmodernism, progressive politics, racism, Refugee's, Religion, resentment, Secularity, T. S. Eliot, The Camp of the Saints, Tolerance, Trump, Uncategorized, violence, Welcoming the other

Glamping ... And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison, and will go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, and will gather them together for the battle; the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up over the breadth of the earth and encompassed the camp of the saints, and the beloved city. -- Revelation chapter 20:7-9a It is unfortunate that the most prescient book ever written about the present mass migration of immigrants from the Third World to the First, especially to the US from Mexico and Central America and to Europe from the Levant, is out of print and therefore unavailable: Jean Raspail’s eerily prophetic The Camp of the Saints (hereafter Camp). (The Amazon link says simply t