Category: Featured

Doesn’t Fit Our List

October 16, 2025

I was sending a proposal to academic publishers and discovered that the current language of rejection is, “doesn’t fit our list.” Can’t argue with that. An editor from one of the most distinguished wrote: “This is a wonderful project, and I enjoyed reading and thinking with your proposal.” Ooh-kay …

Abigail has sometimes received even more striking praise in letters of rejection, one saying, “I hope God doesn’t strike me dead for turning this down.” I have wondered if she should have written back, threatening divine retribution. I suppose calling down infestations and plagues has gone out of style.

The Parts Can Communicate with the Whole

October 16, 2025

 

“Lord, I feel you want me to do more of the mystical stuff, ‘entering’ You and so forth.”

Yes, and you can remove the scare quotes.  There is nothing strange about it.  That is how the universe is.  The parts can communicate with the whole.  It is no more mystical or mysterious than your ability to move your arm. 

Actually, since Descartes introduced a sharp mind-body distinction, how the mind moves the body has been a philosophical mystery.  But, in actual life, it is not.  The parts can communicate with the whole and vice versa.  But I had never thought of the universe that way.

I continued to have experiences of divine indwelling and partial union with God.  Now that I am used to them, they do seem similar to getting lost in an experience.  God mentioned music as one example, and we all know that feeling.  Sometimes you are not something separate, standing back and noting the music—you are immersed in it with your whole frame, without reserve.  However, the more radical, “dissolution of self” mystical experiences—I may have had them two or three times—make me uneasy and I avoid them.

Nico's Wisdom

Nico’s Wisdom

September 28, 2025

My favorite pizza place is closed. It still has a website, but no information about why it is closed and for how long. I found a nearby place called “Nico’s.” As I waited for my food, I looked the many photos covering the wide expanse of one wall. They appeared to be family members, mainly daughters, one of whom was at work in the kitchen. Near where you put in your order was a plaque: “I have my doubts about people with million dollar plans/ And a minimum wage work ethic.” You tell ‘em, Nico!

I Too Can Only Grow Through Suffering

September 25, 2025

 Karma is the Hindu idea that actions, both good and bad, have consequences for a person’s character and fate.

Human beings must learn a lesson.  They are not in this life to sit in the lap of luxury.  It is a challenge, a test.  They can only grow through suffering.  I too can only grow through suffering.  The main suffering is through the consequences of their own actions.  That is the most intense suffering, the kind of suffering that leads to suicide.

There Can Be No Love Without Difference

September 17, 2025

“Lord, Pherecydes also says the world was composed of opposites.”

There can be no love without difference, no harmony or balance without opposing items or forces, no magnetism without the magnet and its object, and so on.

Mystic merging is not quite right.  You (people) need to live out your lives in relation to, in concert with Me, but it would serve no purpose, karmic or otherwise, for you to get lost in Me, like a drop of water in the sea.

I knew that I wanted to love Abigail, not to merge into her, or to have her merge into me.  There is not just unity, but creative tension as well.

edge of infinity what are we to God

“The Eternal Already had the Potential to be a Person.”

September 4, 2025

“Lord, what was there before?  What motivates the act of creation?”

I received the following words and images which I recorded in my notes.

“A feeling of loneliness, of searching, reaching—not yet a Person.  Expanding into the great emptiness of Nothing, which is ‘infinitely empty’ far beyond (far more empty than) empty spaces.  ‘Who am I?  What am I?  Am I an I?  What is an I?’  A chaotic feeling of the infinite rushing at the edges.”

“Lord, why did eternity ‘shatter’ in this way?  Did the still, self-sufficient stuff explode?”

I received the sense:  “Brittle, crystalline, too perfect, static, isolated, removed, alone, bored, incomplete.  The eternal already had the potential to be a Person but could not do so without creating time.”

And I also got the feeling that God desperately wants to be understood.

 

If It Weren’t For the Honor of the Thing …

August 28, 2025

I remembered Abraham Lincoln’s story about the man who was tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.  “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing,” the man said, “I would rather have walked.”  And I had seen the war movies, “You will have the honor of leading the assault.”  Some honors aren’t worth it.

I did feel the honor.  God was about to put His seal on this role for me, a role more suitable for a real Elijah.  I felt a swell of pride, as I was being told this, and immediately the line went dead.  Ego had broken the connection.

 

Tell My Story As I Tell It To You

August 14, 2025

 

“So I should read the scriptures of the major religions?”

Yes, I want you to read the early spiritual history of mankind.  I will lead you to which readings.  I would like you to pray as you read them and take notes as directed.

I grew up at a time when “man” and “mankind” referred to both men and women, and God spoke to me in my own vernacular.

“Lord, You said I was to tell Your story ‘from the inside out.’  But reading the scriptures is ‘from the outside in.’”

Yes, tell My story as I tell it to you.  The only purpose for reading is to give you reference points for understanding My story.

 

Alasdair MacIntyre RIP

August 12, 2025

My friend, Alasdair MacIntyre, died this year. I call him my friend, although our paths crossed only intermittently. I first met him, when he was speaking in Boulder. “I may be a member of the Moral Majority,” he told me. Well, I was too, in a similarly modulated way. Later, when After Virtue appeared on the cover of TIME magazine, I asked him whether he had been prepared for the celebrity. “Not at all,” he said, “not in the least.” But he took it in stride and it served him and his world audience well.

Alasdair owed me nothing. We had never been colleagues or in any other special relationship. Nevertheless, he offered a generous endorsement whenever I asked for it. A few years ago, as he was growing older, lest I leave something important unsaid, I send him a note thanking him for his many kindnesses.

He wrote back that he owed the greater debt to me. For what? For having shared my God experience with him. Though defending one set of philosophical battlements after another over the years, he came, before the end, to have an open soul. God bless him!