"One man looks at a dying bird and thinks there's nothing but unanswered pain. That death's got the final word, it's laughing at him. Another man sees that same bird, feels the glory, feels something smiling through it." (From the opening monologue in The Thin Red Line) "For the early Christians th
06.13.2011| The Fish Tank | Nick Nowalk
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"Above all, I am anxious to grant no credence whatsoever to the special mythology of 'the Enlightenment.' Nothing strikes me as more tiresomely vapid than the notion that there is some sort of inherent opposition--or impermeable partition--between faith and reason, or that the modern period is mar
03.14.2011| The Fish Tank | Nick Nowalk
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Last night, Stephen Fry won the Harvard Secular Society's Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism. The audience packed the pews of Memorial church, and rolled with laughter at Fry's speech, filled with jokes as well as with rhetoric about reason and religion. As a former atheist
02.23.2011| The Fish Tank | Jordan Monge
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*I'll be out of town for a few weeks, but in the meantime I thought it might be helpful to share this brief essay I wrote a few years ago on "theological method," exploring the controversial relationship between faith and reason in Christian thinking. It is in no way an exhaustive treatment, b
08.9.2010| The Fish Tank | Nick Nowalk
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I was perusing the New York Times this week and came upon a pretty interesting op-ed by Stanley Fish. It’s titled, “Does Rationality Know What’s It’s Missing?” In it, he discusses German philosopher Jurgen Habermas’ recent change of heart concerning religion; once a staunch secularist, h
04.14.2010| The Fish Tank | Chelsea Carlson
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After my treatise on reason, there are still some lingering questions: if reason is all that it's cracked up to be, why do so many people disagree? Why do people adhere to beliefs in spite of evidence that they are false? Why are reasoned arguments so uncompelling for many people? I think the simple
03.16.2010| The Fish Tank | Jordan Monge
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Now that we've looked at the external benefits of being reasonable, we must explore why it is important internally for one's spiritual development. For this, I'm going to start with a bold claim – one which would not be controversial were it not for translation problems and for the divide that mod
03.9.2010| The Fish Tank | Jordan Monge
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