“You have to know the truth before you can lie to yourself.”  (comment heard during a recent meeting of technology executives)   Humanity is a highly adaptive, extremely pragmatic species not satisfied with just survival.  We aspire to meaning and significance:  life, beauty, love.  We defy death.  We relentless pursue wisdom using tools that [...]

The gospel of Mark shares a story where Jesus interacts with a man who has asked him to heal his son “if he can”.  When Jesus challenges him on his faith the man anguishes “I do believe, help me overcome my unbelief”. (Mark 9:24)   This tension describes a crisis to which I think many of [...]

The core memes of the Christian gospel emerge from the story of Jesus.  As early Christians contemplated Jesus they, of course, drew implications for life, community, and spirituality.  But, they also grappled with the meaning of Jesus for life, the universe, and everything.  They speculated that the Jesus story was singular but also universal.  His [...]

“A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable.”  www.wikipedia.org/wiki/meme Technical descriptions of memes as units of culture are controversial.  But for my purposes, memes seem a useful way to talk about the way [...]

I believe that the gospel is real. By this, I mean that in a: fundamental sense that the universe is pervasively meaningful:  love, beauty and life are more than emergent ephemera of biochemical processes. Moreover I mean that gospel reality is pervasive and impactful at every moment and place and scale. And, in some sense, [...]