A Sound of Sheer Silence

I'm going to cross my streams a bit here, incorporating some stuff from my other blog that reviews and discusses tabletop role playing games , my hobbyist passion.  More specifically, I want to talk about Glorantha, one of the most interesting and compelling fantasy worlds that I have encountered.  Glorantha was the creation of Greg Stafford (1948-2018), though Stafford preferred to say that he "discovered" Glorantha.  The best way to get a handle on Glorantha is to compare it with Tolkien's Middle Earth.  Tolkien's world is marked by the fact that Tolkien was a linguistics scholar, a product of upper-class English education, and a devout Roman Catholic.  By contrast, Stafford's world is marked by the fact that he was a mythology scholar, a product of the 1960s and 1970s Bay Area American counter-culture, and a practitioner of various Native American religious practices (he died while in a sweat lodge, to put perhaps too fine a point on it).  Glorantha is a...

μόνος, or "monos," means "single" or "only."  θεός, or "theos," means god, originally in the sense of entities like Zeus or Athena.  Together, it is pretty straight-forward--monotheism is a assertion that there is "a single god."  Fair enough. But, within this framework, there are actually a number of permutations.  Rather than spell them all out in the beginning, I'll cut to the case--I believe in and interpret monotheism in the maximum possible way.  I believe there is one and only one divine, transcendent principle, period.  And that singular divine principle, as Aquinas would say, "everyone calls God."  Now, I understand that singular divine principle to be compatible with the assertion that the Son of God came to earth and lived among us, but for the purposes of this reflection that thorny issue is not really relevant, so let's set it to the side. So, only one divine, transcendent principle.  This means, by defini...

All four of my grandparents have passed on.  My father's father died when Dad was in college, long before my mother (and, thus, I) came on the scene.  Dad's mother died when I was two, so I don't really remember her.  But Mom's parents I remember very clearly.  Grandpa died in October of 1991, and Grandma passed away in August of 2001. There are a handful of things that I remember from those funerals.  For Grandpa's, I remember the torrential rains in the 24 hours beforehand, flooding the streets and requiring the police in the small town where they lived to take us to the church in the "paddywagon."  For Grandma's, I remember that the pastor of the parish in which she had been a member for 50 years couldn't be bothered to come to the wake.  But what I remember maybe the most clearly was one of the hymns, sung at both of those services. It was "On Eagle's Wings," by Fr. Michael Joncas.  This song came to mind because President-elect J...

Political theory is one of those disciplines that takes on a very different valence depending on what is going on in our broader social context.  When I was first introduced to political theory in college, in the halcyon late 90s, it felt a little bit frivolous.  Interesting, at least for me, to be sure, but the idea of debating the foundational principles of different forms of government felt like a truly intellectual exercise in a world where it certainly looked like our form of government was on its way to being universal.  Now, in a time when our system feels like it is cracking and in crisis, political theory feels anything but frivolous. Crisis is the origin point of the English tradition of "liberal" political theory that became foundational to the American project, more specifically the English Civil War.  The English Civil War was between an explicitly theocratic insurgency opposed by an, while not exactly "tolerant" at least more broad-minded, establishmen...

Christianity asserts that God is love, and that this assertion reflects a first principle for understanding everything.  In order to make sense of this sentence, we have to have an understanding of what we mean when we say "love," (we also need an understanding of what we mean when we say "God," but let's start with "love").  Here, I would assert that love is fundamentally an action.  Yes, it is associated with feelings or sentiments, but those feelings and sentiments are not really the heart of this concept, I would say.  Love requires one to do something with regard to the one that is loved.  Thus, God is doing something.  But, what is God doing?  Let's hold that question for a moment. The most famous of the parables of the Gospels is probably the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37).  Someone (in the NRSV translation I use, "a lawyer") asks Jesus "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"  Jesus directs the lawyer to ...

1. In 2004, M. Night Shyamalan released a movie called The Village .  Critical reception was not great, but I enjoyed it a great deal when I saw it in the theatre.  I have thought about this movie a number of times since then, and it I think it fundamentally a fable about a certain kind of attitude that we see commonly, especially in religious circles.  To explain this, I need to spoil the movie, and in particular the twist that is the key to the whole thing, so if you want to watch the movie stop reading now. At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to the 19th Century Pennsylvania village of Covington.  We are told two things--that "the towns," from which the elders of the village come, is full of wickedness, and that the forest is inhabited by monsters.  We get a scene early on where the monster stalks through the village at night while the villagers hide in their homes.  Eventually, Ivy (the blind daughter of the head of the village, pl...

COVID, and COVID-tide, has been very kind to me as an objective matter.  No one close to me has died of the Coronavirus, only two people I am close to contracted the virus, and both appear to have recovered completely.  I still have my job, and my employer is doing quite well.  COVID, ultimately, has been mostly an inconvenience, at least in terms of the direct impact it has had on me.   And, yet, COVID-tide has coincided with a crisis of faith for me.  Like many things, this has become only apparent to me as I have started to climb out of it in the last few weeks, with the help of a couple of old friends, and one new one.  If I have to describe it, I would call it a spiritual depression, in the sense that I had all of the now-familiar to me symptoms of depression, but only as it related to matters relating to faith.  That strange combination of lassitude and anxiety greeted me every time I tried to watch a service via streaming, or engage with ot...

Could everyone PLEASE stop sharing this video of Michael Lofthouse? He’s the founder & CEO of Solid8, a tech company based in San Francisco. If it goes viral it could hurt Michael Lofthouse and Solid8, his company. Let’s all be nice to Michael Lofthouse and Solid8. https://t.co/WH7MKrWnzQ — Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) July 7, 2020 Last night, Patton Oswalt, a (in my opinion) very funny comedian, Tweeted out to his many followers a video of a man shouting racial slurs at a family having a birthday celebration at a restaurant.  But, he didn't simply do that.  He also provided identifying information about the man that was shouting those slurs, and more importantly about his company and its business activities.  It doesn't take deep analysis to understand what Oswalt was trying to do here--the idea is to create social and economic consequences for this person stemming from his racist views and actions.  In the ideal world, from Oswalt's perspective, this dude wo...

History is the story we tell about our present, using the past as the main characters. Up until I was ten, I lived in New Jersey.  For those readers who do not live in the United States, New Jersey is a small state (in terms of area, not population) located between two large metropolitan areas--New York and Philadelphia.  Where we were, in central New Jersey along the coast, we were in the orbit of New York, and so we got all of the New York media and New York oriented content.  And yet, Oceanport was not a suburb, at least in the newly-built post-World War II sense of a suburb.  It was really more of a small town--older, more conservative--that happened to be 90 or so minutes on the train from New York City. Fourth grade was the last year I lived in Oceanport, and for social studies we spent the whole year on New Jersey history.  That study culminated in the fourth grade class putting on a play about New Jersey history.  I think about this play a lot, most...

In January 1968, the North Vietnamese army launched the Tet Offensive, a campaign the profoundly and permanently undermined the American public's confidence in the Vietnam war.  Over 16,000 American soldiers would die in Vietnam over the course of 1968.  In April, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.  In the spring of 1968, riots swept American cities.  In June, Bobby Kennedy, who was almost surely going to be the Democratic nominee for President in the fall, was assassinated.  Ultimately, in November, former Vice President Richard Nixon, a Republican, defeated then-current Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Given these facts, it is natural to look to 1968 as a model for 2020.  And, those that do that tend to think that this analogy would favor the Republican, Donald Trump.  But I think that is facile.  Yes, there are many parallels between 1968 and 2020, but those parallels point as much against Trump as they point toward him.  And there a...