We can conceive of God as one who is present everywhere (omnipresent), including all of time – past, present and future. That obviously depends on our understanding of time. We can also conceive of God as being omniscient in this sense – knowing all things past, present and future. For such a god nothing is…
I have never tried to stand in the way of a train at full speed. The fact that you are reading this suggest that neither have you. Time, like a train, is often experienced as an unstoppable and unyielding movement. You either flow with it or you are crushed by it, but never does…
Unknown, yet intriguing. Dangerous, yet exciting. The future. So much effort invested to determine it. So much time spent to secure it. Yes, our actions today have consequences that extend into the future, but the future is much larger than what we can personally control. If we ever succeed in making the future certain, it…
Violence is easily recognized as evil when it is directed against us. It is however more difficult to recognize it as such when it is our own violence directed against deserving targets. In fact, our own violence is most often seen as sacred and sanctioned by God himself. Righteous indignation, justified retribution, are some of…
It was 1998 in a very turbulent South Africa. As I opened the front door and shouted to our dog, Mandy, to keep quiet as she had been barking incessantly, a man grabbed me from behind and held a knife to my throat. As he swung me round I just remember pointing a finger in…
Many popular slogans instruct us to be authentic by refusing to imitate others: Be yourself, everyone else is taken; You were born an original, don’t die a copy. etc. What these sayings incorrectly imply is that the less influence one allows others to have on oneself, the more authentic one will be. It assumes that…
“… my life is divided into two parts—before my encounter with René Girard, and after.” Jean-Michel Oughourlian (1) I remember reading this about a year ago and thinking: that is a huge statement to make of any person. Its the kind of thing people would say about the day they met Jesus – a conversion…
The problem of interpretation is nothing new. It was as important to the first believers as it is today. The road to Emmaus is a brilliant piece of literature in which Luke gives us a profound insight into the art of interpreting scripture. But I must begin this article with an acknowledgement. Luke 24 has…
In the 1999 film ‘Fight Club’, Edward Norton’s character has an epiphany. Sobbing into Meat Loaf’s weirdly ample bosom, he confesses ‘I let go… I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom’. Watch the clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtIEquOkDpo I have had a similar experience dawn on me. I didn’t mean to find it. I was pretty…
… I am not convinced by the objection that the performance of a musical work of art is interpretation in a different sense from, say, reaching understanding in reading a poem or looking at a painting. All performance is primarily interpretation and seeks, as such, to be correct. In this sense it, too, is “understanding.”(1)…