Miscellaneous Writings – 2021
Here are a few short, expressive pieces I wrote last year that don’t fit anywhere in particular. Hope you enjoy! Prompt: “Compare and contrast the city/city life with nature/rural life” That great concrete jungle beckons the ambitious masses, but there is no true wilderness, no true adventure within its limits. It echoes with the neutered…
The Wind of the Winds
Myriad places of natural beauty in the world seem to have a “presence” or “spirit” about them. One notices this spirit by being present and paying attention to the environment. At the same time, its ways seem elusive, and even transient. “The wind—the spirit—blows where it wills, but you do not know where it comes…
A “Maximally Personal” Understanding of the Incarnation
What does it mean that God is “personal”? Roughly speaking, that he is “like us” in many ways. But for Jews and Christians, it is actually we who are like him: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27).…
Healing Chaos, Transcending Order
It’s an odd thing, perhaps, to eagerly anticipate a book of rules, given that the only rule in our atomizing cultural zeitgeist is that there should be no rules. But Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life is exactly the volume that I and many others have craved from the pen of psychologist Jordan Peterson.…
Shall We Become Ocean?
What is the ocean? What is the sound of the depths? Shall we “become” the ocean? These are the questions John Luther Adams calls forth in his compelling orchestral piece, “Become Ocean”. The listener quickly realizes that the floodgates of melody and harmony have been breached, and water flows through them as it pleases–sometimes as…
Augustine’s Modern-Day Meaning Crisis
Readers of the Confessions know how surprisingly relevant this ancient masterpiece is to our modern age. In the process of interleaving his intellectual development with his personal confusion and consternation over his lifestyle and relationships, Augustine speaks to many facets of human experience. Far from being a dry patristic tract, Confessions paints a picture of…
A Study of the Solar Eclipse — Prize Edit
A year ago I kicked off this blog with the post A Study of the Solar Eclipse. I later revised this piece and submitted it to a writing contest at my college, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I won the second-place prize for the piece–you can find the contest results here. Below I’ve posted the prize-winning…
The Ruach Prayer
Last year I had the privilege of visiting one of America’s lesser-known national parks, Great Sand Dunes (on the same trip that I experienced sunrise in the San Juan Mountains). Nestled in a bay-like formation between Colorado’s soaring Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east and the vast Rio Grande river valley to the west…
Reflections on The Resurrection of the Son of God
I recently finished New Testament scholar N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God, one of the most thorough surveys of resurrection belief in the Jewish and Christian traditions. This academic 700+ page tome is just a fraction of Wright’s larger project of documenting the origin of Christian belief and the question of its…
The Epistemology of Experience
Recently I’ve had long discussions (and debates) with a good friend of mine, a Millennial, on topics such as religion, sex, morality, and more. This friend, while not an atheist/materialist, would identify as “spiritual but not religious” and has a strong aversion towards organized religion and dogma. In these discussions I noticed a curious way…
Musings on the use of “God’s glory” in Reformed theology
I’m currently reading The Essential Jonathan Edwards by Owen Strachan and Douglas Sweeney, a compact introduction to the great pastor-theologian’s life and teachings. I may later write about the book as a whole, but my discussion here centers around a curious description from the authors about the Northampton revival Edwards presided over. If ministers in…
San Juan Sunrise
“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere…” –John Muir In August of 2019, my dad and I undertook our annual trip from our Wisconsin home to the western United States. I’ve previously written about my experience of the 2017 solar eclipse, which happened on one of these trips, and I want to…
The Pleasing Aroma of Ash Wednesday
A year ago on this day of the week, I attended an Ash Wednesday service for the first time. The sweeping Gothic architecture, resonating organ, and liturgical worship of Luther Memorial Church in Madison, WI presented a sharp contrast with the services of my charismatic heritage. But I certainly sensed the personal presence of God…
Video Game Speedrunning: Beyond eSports
In the past decade or so, much attention has fallen on the burgeoning popularity of eSports, multiplayer video games played competitively in a sport-like context. The most popular titles are largely real-time strategy, fighting, or first-person shooter games, such as League of Legends, Defense of the Ancients, Counter-Strike, Fortnite, and Super Smash Bros, and the…
Soteriology and Logical Possibility
Underlying Christian discussions about the nature of salvation are philosophical assumptions about possibility and the nature of God. We often are trying to square Christian doctrines with philosophical consistency when we discuss how individuals are saved, and this is a worthwhile goal. Therefore, evaluating the philosophical worldviews we each bring to both the biblical text…
Swimming and Confronting Chaos
Ten years of my childhood and adolescence were spent participating in competitive swimming. It was by far my strongest extracurricular commitment, extending year-round in both club and high school programs. Through it I learned priceless life lessons and cultivated a habit of applying focused, determined effort to tasks. It also became a central part of…
Abortion: A Brief Philosophical Investigation
I wrote the following essay for a philosophy class titled “Contemporary Moral Issues”. One of the main units was about the morality of abortion. Though one might think that a class at a major campus (UW Madison) in one of the most progressive cities in America would be anything but balanced, the arguments presented were…
Shapiro, Schaeffer, and the Story of the West
Among the most popular political pundits today is Ben Shapiro. Commanding the attention of tech-savvy millennial and Gen-Z conservatives, he is at the forefront of the burgeoning Internet-based conservative movement currently succeeding the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys of talk radio and cable TV.* In Shapiro’s most recent book, The Right Side of History, he…
Video Games as Art: Introspection
What follows is a paper I wrote for a class I took my first semester of college in the fall of 2017, titled “Philosophical Reflections on Science and Technology”. The class itself was my first formal introduction to the philosophical mode of thought and dialogue–we read writers such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, and Neil…
Calvinism, Arminianism and the Problem of Proof-Texting
In Christian discussions about soteriology (the doctrine of salvation), the greatest impasse between Calvinists and Arminians* is what’s known as proof-texting. With respect to the Bible, this is the practice of cherry-picking isolated, often out-of-context verses and eisegeting one’s view on to them. Using proof-texting, one can claim that practically anything, however outlandish, is supported…
A Study of the Solar Eclipse
The “Great American Eclipse” was an event unlike any other in American history. Crossing the Lower 48 states on August 21, 2017, over the course of a few hours the moon’s hulking shadow bisected the country in a path from Oregon to South Carolina. This eclipse, striking a well-populated and technologically connected continent, became far…
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