Picking up Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time in an Oxford bookshop this past May was a surreal moment. After all, it was C. S. Lewis—who taught at Oxford’s Magdalen College for 29 years, and is buried at its Holy Trinity Church—who originally kickstarted my long-standing fascination with time. In many ways, Rovelli is simply …
Continue reading Time is Ignorance: From C. S. Lewis to Carlo Rovelli
I'm no scientist, but I've been reading a lot of science lately. My reasons are threefold: I'm writing a science fiction manuscript that is in no small part influenced by the little I understand about cosmology + time + quantum physics; I now work in research communications for a state university, so it's my job to be …
Continue reading Three Lightning Rods: or, What the Universe Tells Me About God
I've adopted a new morning prayer. I wholeheartedly recommend it, despite the fact that (warning) it's terribly effective at sabotaging my ego throughout the day. It goes like this: Dear God, please prove me wrong about something today. I'm oh-so-tempted to leave out all the addendums that make that statement considerably less pious, like: "...but prove me right …
You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it. Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk As much as I'd like to pretend otherwise, I'm a person who thrives on …
I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be. This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in …
Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the Earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; …
One of my favorite modern parables is G.K. Chesterton's Tremendous Trifles. It's short and sweet – just over a thousand words – but it's become something of a touchstone for me in the years since I first read it. (It also kicks off an equally wonderful collection of essays published under the same title. Read them all: they're …
With all the hoopla surrounding the new Star Wars trilogy, I've fallen back into an old habit that once came quite naturally: navigating towering expectations and crackpot speculation about the future of the galaxy far, far away. Some people are partying like it's 1999 again, others are still nursing the hangover the prequels left - me, …
The other night, I finally watched Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux) – a French film based on the true story of seven Trappist monks who lived in the Algerian mountains in 1996, when religious violence was overtaking the country. The monks were threatened and eventually killed by Islamic fundamentalists. That might …
This is the paradox of [Christmas]; that henceforth the highest thing can only work from below. Royalty can only return to its own by a sort of rebellion... Olympus still occupied the sky like a motionless cloud molded into many mighty forms; philosophy still sat in the high places and even on the thrones of the …
