Skeptical Faith

Google Image The following is from a recent display, called “Funny Notes from Little Kids,” on the MSN home page: Dear tooth fareis: My tooth whent down the drane. It was an accident. Will you take this eyelash insted? From Emerson An arrow points to a circle Emerson made with his pencil. Presumably, he had placed an eyelash - or part of one – there. We can smile because a child wrote it. If an adult had written it, it certainly wouldn’t have made it onto a nationwide stage unless it was part of a news story on adults who believe in tooth ferries and who had been denied an education, and we wouldn’t smile. We adults try not to be childish or juvenile - except when it comes to God and religion. This is especially evident at Christmas time. We get caught up in the childish accidentals and miss the substance. Many of us also have childish or juvenile reasons for believing, and just as childish or juvenile reasons for not believing. How many of us believers have m...

Google Image During his first week in college, Michael Conway’s grandmother - a great cook who always shared what she made – died, and after the funeral, Conway got into a conversation with the guy who worked at his dorm’s front desk. Seeing his stress, the guy invited Michael to join a group called Labre, which seeks out homeless people in downtown Chicago, offering them hot dogs, granola bars and occasional toiletries. The guy obviously knew that Michael needed to “get out of himself,” specifically by “paying forward” his grandmother’s generosity. Fortunately, it worked for Michael, who took the risk to become a regular member of Labre during his four years in college. I recently read about him and the account of his “calling” in America magazine, making me think of how searchers for God, in a variety of unlikely ways, “find” him/her. Many people today think that searching for God is anything but risky, that it’s an accommodation to the status quo. But is it, really? I’v...

   Photo by Beatriz Botero Tom Pfeffer, my sister’s brother-in-law, was an extraordinary priest who was pastor of a mostly Hispanic parish before he died in April of 2004. Before that, he was pastor of a rural Iowa parish where he noticed on frequent funeral trips to the cemetery a lone grave outside the official Catholic cemetery. After some research he found that a man who had committed suicide years before was buried there. According to Catholic rules at the time, the man couldn’t be buried in a Catholic cemetery, considered to be consecrated ground. Tom made it known that he wanted to be buried next to the man, also outside the official cemetery. It reportedly caused a stir among some who didn’t want their beloved Tom to be buried in “unholy” ground. But Tom won. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he didn’t view suicide as a cowardly act resulting from despair. For him, compassion trumped passing judgment. He understood that people can be so down on the...

Google Image Years ago, I was at a party where an acquaintance, when asked his profession, said with a straight face that he was “an economist.” He never worked in that field. He had an undergraduate degree in economics. My credentials as a psychologist or sociologist are even flimsier, but I’m interested in what makes people happy or not. And when I say “happy,” I’m not talking about how you feel right now, or even how you feel today or this week. I’m talking about an inner joy, an optimism about life that some people have and others don’t. Happy people make people around them happier, of course, and unhappy people do the opposite. This subject is important when discussing faith because although I believe joy results from faith (and this may be reflected in the many studies showing that people of faith are happier), being optimistic and upbeat also help searchers find God, and him/her to find us. Finding God by looking into ourselves and by seeing him/her in others, as spir...

Google Image (This blog was originally published in 2014. I did some updating for 2018, but it's mostly the same. The sentiments, especially the hope that readers will have a thankful Thanksgiving, are also the same.) I was a columnist at one point in my newspaper career, and for several Thanksgivings, my whole column comprised a list of names of people to whom I was particularly thankful. I had thought about doing that with this blog, which will be posted on Thanksgiving Day, my favorite of all the holidays. But in the interest of privacy, which is becoming a rarer commodity, I decided against it. You know who you are. You’re family and friends and the readers of this blog, including the people to whom I send weekly e-mails about the posts, my Facebook friends and the unknown number who see it on Google+ and Tumblr. I am particularly grateful to Jim Stessman, my friend and former newspaper colleague, for looking these blogs over each week and providing valuable fee...

Google Image A recent article in America magazine dealt with the affinity between Pope Francis and Rabbi Abraham Heschel, a biophysicist and author who died in 1972. The Pope and Heschel never met, but Heschel had a great influence on Rabbi Abraham Skorka, Francis’ good friend in his native Argentina. Back in 1976, Heschel wrote a book called “God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism.” Even 38 years ago, it seems, the handwriting was on the wall about future generations’ lack of enthusiasm for religion, and Heschel’s book still speaks volumes. “It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society,” he wrote. “It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. “When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of t...

Google Image A staple of this blog is that many people, believers and non-believers, struggle with faith. Like non-believers, many believers have doubts and questions. Some have spent lifetimes of struggle with questions about God. For various reasons, believers have come down on the side of faith. Many of us, like the psalmist says, simply “cling to him/her in love.” Today’s believers can’t bank on the artificial props of the past, however. They can’t depend on God as an answer to questions about the natural world, or assume that most people (including family members) are like-minded or attend church regularly. And modern society, with all its advantages in prosperity (in many parts of the world) and advances in technology, has brought an unprecedented amount of anxiety, stress and “busyness,” all obstacles in the search for God. Many believers also share with atheists and agnostics the desire to be truthful, to see things as they really are. But it’s easy to confuse your...

Google Image I heard an anecdote years ago about an elementary teacher who repeatedly stamped each pupil’s paper with, “You’re special!” Ok, so it could mean, “You’re one of a kind,” or “You’re special to me,” but the irony of stamping everyone’s paper with that phrase was evidently lost on the teacher, and on many of the students if Tim Urban, a blogger for the Huffington Post, is to be believed. Thinking they’re special is one reason people in Generation Y, the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s, are unhappy, Urban wrote in a post last year. Lucy, his fictional character from Gen Y, is also part of a yuppie culture that comprises a large portion of Gen Y. “I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group – I call them Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs. A GYPSY is a unique brand of yuppie,” he writes, who think they are “the main characters of a very special story.” Urban has a formula: Happiness = Reality – Expectations. For hi...

Google Image There’s an old joke about an Irish immigrant woman who found a job as a housekeeper for an affluent American family during the early part of the last century. The lady of the house became upset with the woman’s work and said, “Bridget, the dust is so thick on that sideboard I can write my name on it!”   “Ah,” replied Bridget, “isn’t education a wonderful thing?”   I read this joke in a book about Irish American history. The author used it to describe the difficulty Irish immigrants had in being accepted into American society. Many Americans didn’t understand the Irish – not their “English,” nor their religion nor their self-deprecating humor. With comments like Bridget’s, many Americans didn’t know whether the Irish were sincere, were putting them on or making fun of them.   (My brother, Jack, who died in 2010 and whom I greatly miss, loved to tell the story about the time he and other family members were in County Waterford, Ireland. He struc...