Lewis and Heschel on Faith #1
I use the word miracle to mean an interference with Nature by supernatural power. Unless there exists, in addition to Nature, something else we may call the supernatural, there can be no miracles. -C.S. Lewis, Miracles, ch. 2. It is…
Faith and Wisdom, A Sermon on Belief and Intelligence
We had a large Bar Mitzvah crowd this past Saturday (120 guests in addition to our regular congregational attendance) and had to meet at a hotel (our building can’t hold that many). The “Caleb” referenced in the sermon is the…
The Heschel Files, #3
In this series we are slowly considering the exploration of faith and the act of believing in God as expressed in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s God in Search of Man. We’re still in chapter 1, as this is the longest of…
God-Stories vs. Godless Stories
I’m reading Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, a very well written novel in the fantasy genre (a genre I love and which I am writing in as you can see here). One his little side stories made me…
Teaching Faith to Youth
I’ve been doing a short series on Sabbath afternoons with the youth of our congregation talking about faith. I didn’t have any when I was a teenager and was not raised in any sort of religious environment. So I find,…
Is Faith Imagined?
Many people suspect so. And I don’t just mean the critics. Many people who believe wonder, “Am I just imagining this?” I used to hear as an objection to faith, “It’s wish-fulfillment. You wish there were such a thing as…
Sci-Fi, God, the Universe, and Us
Science fiction was my religion once. Asimov was my prophet and Clark too, and my teacher was Sagan. That was before I came to Jesus and Judaism. Some of the radical amazement I used to feel for the vastness of…
God in Search of Man, #4
Justin Bond sort of got the jump on me over at Messiah Connection. I had discussed possibly resurrecting J-BOM (the Jewish Book of the Month). And 3.5 people responded enthusiastically! I’d said let’s make Heschel’s God in Search of Man…
God, Air, and Dragon Con
I spent most of my weekend at Dragon Con, the huge comics and sci-fi convention in Atlanta that is held every Labor Day. 30,000 plus people converge on Atlanta. Many wear faerie wings or Star Trek or a thousand other…
Faith Without a Reason? Pt 1
A popular Jewish blogger, whose blog I only recently started following, has a recurrent theme. In the midst of commentary on the news of the Jewish world and Israel mixed with some religious reflection and Torah commentary, this blogger enjoys…
Main page, author/speaker: