A Sound of Sheer Silence

Rachel Held Evans passed away yesterday, as a result of a cascading series of complications stemming from the flu.  She was 37 years old, and leaves behind a husband and two very small children. Social media was awash in tributes to Evans yesterday, and she had an obituary in the New York Times  and other general-interest fora.  Many of the personal tributes were from folks with a similar background as Evans--raised evangelical (perhaps fundamentalist) Christian, once committed to this model but in time came to have grave doubts, struggling to rebuild some notion of the faith.  The tributes were particularly poignant from women, for whom she provided a voice in a place that does not often take women's voices seriously, and/or LGBT folks, for whom she was one of the earliest and most uncompromising advocates for their full inclusion in the evangelical space.  I was also struck by the praises from writers and theologians of color regarding Evans's commitment to...

Leonard Cohen died yesterday.  He wrote many wonderful songs, but certainly his most famous is "Hallelujah," and rightfully so. Now I've heard there was a secret chord That David played, and it pleased the Lord But you don't really care for music, do you? It goes like this The fourth, the fifth The minor fall, the major lift The baffled king composing Hallelujah I have no problem with science, and I absolutely refuse to accept the Luddite notion that there is something inherently wicked about our technological civilization, especially in light of the human suffering from disease and starvation that we have been able to mitigate with that technology.  But I also simply cannot accept the idea that the phenomenon of human experience is capable of being reduced to purely materialistic concepts that can be explained scientifically.  So much of what we do and what we experience is deeply irrational and purposeless according to those pure scientific standards, and ...