Skeptical Faith

Google Image I don’t recall how, but I recently came across the above painting of St. Jerome by a 15 th century Italian artist named Benvenuto Tisi da Garafalo. Being nearly illiterate in art, I had never heard of him or his painting of St. Jerome. But I’ve always been interested in St. Jerome, who lived almost 200 years before Garafalo painted his picture. I’ll get to why St. Jerome interests me, but first, a bit about the painting. Garafalo evidently was a tireless painter of religious subjects, especially of Mary, the mother of Jesus. This painting of St. Jerome strikes me as a bit bizarre for modern observers, picturing Jerome with his shirt undone and several strange objects around him while he holds a book in his hand. His face is evidently meant to show him thinking about what he’s reading – thus, the painting’s title, “Meditation of St. Jerome?” Among the First Christian Scholars That title makes sense because Jerome is counted as among the first Christian scholars. Born...

Google Image I’ve told this story to many people because I think it’s a fascinating illustration of how fear often gets the better of us. I heard the story from my wife’s, sister who was a lifelong teacher in the beautiful city of Medellin, Colombia. She told it about a fellow teacher and friend who boarded an after-school city bus carrying in her wallet her monthly wages - in cash. She placed the wallet in her purse, and since a lot of thefts had been reported during this period, the woman was careful to hold on to the purse carefully. She was standing on the bus in the midst of a crowd of passengers, one of whom was a man who seemed too interested in the purse. A Suspicious Man Someone rose from a nearby seat and the woman quickly took it, mostly to get away from the suspicious man. But almost immediately, the person in the seat next to her got up to leave and the man immediately took that seat. After a few minutes, the woman nervously checked her purse for the wallet and found...

Google Image  I keep coming back i n these blogs  to the perceived conflict between faith and science, mostly because so many people cite it as a reason for having lost their faith. A common view is that all scientists, at least the most respected ones, are non-believers and that faith and science are incompatible. (And from what I’ve read, I believe some scientists who are not believers disparage scientists who are.) But some of the most famous scientists in history were believers. They include Galileo, Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Gregor Mendel, and Georges Lemaître, physicist and astronomer who first proposed the “Big Bang. (The latter two were priests.) Science Had Few Answers All of them lived in the past, and some skeptics might say that, of course, people who lived in past eras were believers because science had few answers to questions about the universe. But many modern scientists are believers as well. They include Francis Collins, a geneticist who led the Human...

Google Image One of my favorite songs in Spanish is a well-known tune by Argentina’s iconic singer, Mercedes Sosa, who died in 2009. I’ve mentioned it before in this blog. Here are the Spanish and English lyrics to the first verse. The first line is also the name of the song. Solo le pido a Dios Que la reseca muerte no me encuentre Vacía y sola sin haber hecho lo suficiente. Q ue el dolor no me sea indiferente Only this I ask of God That sadness doesn’t make me indifferent; That an arid death doesn’t find me Empty and alone without having done enough. I believe one of my favorite authors, Tomas Halik, would like this. I’ve started reading a new book by Halik, the Czech priest, philosopher, and theologian who has won the Templeton Prize and has been a visiting professor at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard universities . Subjective and Simplistic? I’ve written often about Halik in these blogs. He’s among my favorite authors because he wants to change in religion what ough...

Google Image In college, I read a book that profoundly affected my faith, contributing to a faith crisis that lasted for years. Entitled “Honest to God,” and written by Anglican Bishop John A.T. Robinson, it criticized traditional Christian theology and aroused a storm of controversy when published in 1963. The book also inspired public interest in Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher who died in 1900. Nietzsche gained fame in his time for saying that “God is dead.” (That spawned the joke, “God is dead. Signed Nietzsche. Nietzsche is dead, signed God.”) According to the online publication, “Thinking,” Nietzsche’s quote is “often misunderstood or taken out of context.” Nietzsche, it says, was referring to how the Enlightenment, the era in Europe in the 17 th and 18 th centuries when intellectuals were touting rationalism and empiricism and the separation of church and state, “had contributed to the erosion of religious beliefs, which had long served as a foundational belief s...