Frankfort School philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote: The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject. (Negative Dialectics) Adorno was one of the creators of what is known as critical theory. …

The media spectacle of the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes in the summer of 1925 underlined for many religious liberals that Charles Darwin’s natural selection would be the wedge that permanently split Western religious thinking into two broad camps. The question became what position the most protesting of…

I have loved what are called “the liberal arts” for most of my life. I can truthfully say that I moved from biblical fundamentalism to a lover of literary Modernism in the wink of an eye. I took one look at T.S. Eliot’s poetry and Allen Ginsberg’s poetry and I…

The Taoist Zhuangzi (4th century BCE) told this tale: Once there was a frog that lived in a deep, narrow well. He had never seen anything else. One day, a sea turtle came upon the well and shouted down the deep, narrow hole: “Hello! Anybody down there?” “Yes,” said the…

I ran into this online the other day; the title of the article fairly well says it all: “New study links intrinsic religious motivation to higher-level patterns of thought.” The article goes on: “The main takeaway from this study is that people who are motivated to pursue religion or spirituality…

“ . . . courage shall fail the king and the officials; the priests shall be appalled and the prophets astounded” (Jeremiah 4:9 NRSV). I don’t remember how I ran across those lines from the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, but they ring true—fearful, appalled, astounded . . . kings, officials, priests…

The American monk and theologian Thomas Merton (1915–1968) adapted some of the work of the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi (370–287 BCE). Here is a bit of Merton’s adaptation, with slight changes of my own: Once three friends were discussing life. One said: “Can people live together and know nothing of life, …

We live in stories. We live so deeply and completely in stories that it’s hard to see the narratives that we live inside as narratives. In unexamined life, the stories we have been told and the stories we’ve learned to tell ourselves appear to be “reality.” …

As the sacred center of Greek society, the Temple of Apollo at Delphi has long represented the core of European thought. Everyone in Europe and its many colonies knows the first of the injunctions written on the temple’s wall: γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnōthi seautón, ”know thyself”) Wise and difficult words if…