E Pluribus Unum

How is it that the many are made one?

Traditionally, the many are made one through a unified purpose, common beliefs, and/or common characteristics. The Church, for example, has sought to achieve unity in truth, uniting around the common goal of right worship and/or right living as well as the common beliefs of biblical orthodoxy.

In common political discussions, it is evident that people desire unity under some common idea or goal. People tend to believe that what the government spends money on is supposed to represent the common goals of our society. If we spend a lot on the military and not enough on education, this means the society cares too much about war and not enough about teaching our children.

If we go to the human brain, as I blogged a few days ago, we see that the human mind is the result of the complex inner working of a neural network. Suppose we examine a single brain cell. Can it understand English? Can it do mathematics? Can it think about God or philosophy? Assuredly no. A single neuron is not capable of human thought. In fact, human thought is only possible when neurons work together as a complex system.

But what are brain cells actually doing? Are they working together toward a common goal which each of them has in mind? Not remotely. A brain cell does not have a mind; it is rather a very minuscule piece of a vast and complicated network that constitutes a mind. Explaining the behavior of the whole brain to an individual brain cell is obviously sheer madness.

As I understand it, the general goal of each brain cell is actually to do nothing more than maximize the amount of energy it receives. No one brain cell is making decisions on a macro level; yet the collective behavior of all these brain cells constitutes, well, you--your personality, your insights, your creativity, your beliefs, and even your will. That is my understanding.

Now suppose we say that all these neurons should work together, unite around a single common purpose. Since each brain cell understands nothing more than how to maximize the energy it receives, this common purpose would have nothing to do with anything other than maximizing the energy that individual cells receive. If brain cells worked together toward this task, you might have an interesting collection of cells--but you would not have a brain. Human thought actually depends on brain cells behaving entirely locally, each of them having no sense of what human thought even is, much less how to achieve it.

So it is, I believe, with society. We are tempted to think that we ought to unite human beings around common goals--such as, in politics, providing health care and education to all, or in religion, determining what is the most sound doctrine. But these are all human goals. Just as human thought is infinitely far above the activity of a single neuron, so the potential output of a human society is infinitely far above human thought.

What exactly that potential output is, I cannot explain, for I can only explain what human thought can absorb. This makes it difficult for us humans to accept as a legitimate goal. Brain cells have the advantage of having very little choice in the matter. They develop in an environment in which proper relationships between cells is already established, and although each cell is really only aware that it is maximizing its own energy efficiency, yet the collective result is the miracle of intelligence.

Therefore it seems to me that one of the dangers to human society is this desire we have to make human decisions collectively. We are like little neurons who decide to run the brain democratically. The result is one big blob that hardly even begins to realize the true potential of the collective.

If we believe in the many being one, we need to ask, one what? Many humans becoming one human? The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is stated as "one God in three persons," not "one person in three persons" or "one God in three Gods." Similarly, the goal of human society should simply be, "many humans, one society." The society does not have goals and purposes as humans have goals and purposes. Its goals and purposes are as far out of the reach of a human being as those of a human being are out of the reach of a single cell.

Thomas Sowell on Fairness

Thomas Sowell recently wrote a four-part series on "The Fallacy of 'Fairness,'" which you can read here, here, here, and here.

Being already quite familiar with much of Sowell's work, nothing I read was that surprising. I have always enjoyed Sowell's contrarian nature, his common-sense debunking of starry-eyed liberal optimism, and his extensive knowledge of economics that he brings to bear on current issues.

However, Sowell deserves a good critique, coming not from the Left but from someone who is at least moderately conservative in outlook. He certainly has his points, which I don't mind agreeing with, but what ties all of his arguments together is a philosophy of individualism that I fundamentally disagree with.

First, the points I don't mind agreeing with. Sowell is right to point out that equality of treatment does not necessarily lead to equality of results, and probably never could:

Some years ago, for example, there was a big outcry that various mental tests used for college admissions or for employment were biased and "unfair" to many individuals or groups. Fortunately there was one voice of sanity-- David Riesman, I believe-- who said: "The tests are not unfair. LIFE is unfair and the tests measure the results."

This is absolutely correct, and Sowell is extremely good at conjuring up numerous examples along these same lines to demonstrate his point.

Sowell is right to criticize the overeager Left for wanting to pull the "discrimination card" all too often.

Creating a difference that would not exist otherwise is discrimination, and something can be done about that. But, in recent times, virtually any disparity in outcomes is almost automatically blamed on discrimination, despite the incredible range of other reasons for disparities between individuals and groups.

Perhaps the best thing about Sowell is that he really is firm on saying it isn't your fault if you were raised in a poor neighborhood or a broken home; likewise it isn't your virtue if you were raised in a rich family with two parents. Circumstances are inherited, and there's nothing you can do about that. And the same goes for natural ability.

Mixed up with the question of fairness to individuals and groups has been the explosive question of whether individuals and groups have the innate ability to perform at the same levels, if they are all treated alike or even given the same objective opportunities.

Intellectuals have swung from one side of this question at the beginning of the 20th century to the opposite side at the end. Both those who said that achievement differences among races and classes were due to genes, in the early years of the 20th century, and those who said that these differences were due to discrimination, in the later years, ignored the old statisticians' warnings that correlation is not causation.

So before one makes a shallow argument against Sowell as just another conservative with prejudices against people he thinks are lazy, one should really look carefully at what he is saying. He is not saying that a person's misfortunes are all his own fault; far from it. He simply objects to innocent people having to pay to correct misfortunes they had no part in causing.

Finally, Sowell gets to the heart of the matter, which is the problem of misdiagnosing society's condition:

It is certainly a great misfortune to be born into families or communities whose values make educational or economic success less likely. But to have intellectuals and others come along and misstate the problem does not help to produce better results, even if it produces a better image.

Here I still very much agree with Sowell. For instance, I have seen first hand how many students in lower income neighborhoods are unable to succeed, not simply because they are poor, but because studying is not a cultural good for them. I suppose innate ability might occasionally have something to do with it, but as there is absolutely nothing we can do about innate ability, we ought to focus on what we can do, which is try to teach the value of learning. But to do this is to admit that there's something wrong with the culture in which these kids have grown up, which is potentially a difficult admission in today's politically correct climate.

However, here's where I part with Sowell. He says,

Political correctness may make it hard for anyone to challenge the image of helpless victims of an evil society. But those who are lagging do not need a better public relations image. They need the ability to produce better results for themselves-- and a romantic image is an obstacle to directing their efforts toward developing that ability.

I've added emphasis to this statement to clarify what I think is wrong with Sowell's philosophy. I do not think life is fundamentally about what each of us can do individually. Our collective identity also has meaning.

That's not to say I'm a "collectivist," which is what the Right often accuses the Left of being. No, indeed, I think the false rhetoric of the Left comes out of the same individualist mindset that plagues the Right.

Think about it. Instead of appealing to our sense of corporate identity as Americans to help less fortunate groups of people, the Left more often cries "injustice" as if certain individuals had been personally wronged. As Americans, we can't help but be outraged at personal injustice. So the Left basically keeps lying to us and telling us it's still all our fault--we're still discriminating against minorities, etc.

The tragedy is that there would be no need for this kind of rhetoric if we had more of a collective sense of success and failure. This is a fundamental question we should ask ourselves: How do we measure the success of our culture? Is it in the ability of individuals to have upward social mobility? Despite what many on the Left seem to say, I do believe America wins in that category.

Yet where we fail is to deal with the philosophical question of how we ought to truly measure success, and I'm not sure it should be limited to the success of individuals. Anyone who has ever been on a sports team or something similar (for me it was drum line in high school) knows what it means to succeed or fail as a team. "You're only as strong as your weakest link" was what I always heard. It doesn't matter how good your best player is; what matters is whether the group as a whole succeeds.

Along with this question of how we measure success comes the question, who is "we"? We know to be responsible for certain people in our lives--our family, our close friends, and if we are Christians, members of the church (many equivalents exist for other faiths). But what does it mean that we're all Americans? Does that mean we're responsible for one another? Are we in any sense a family? These are tricky questions.

I am certainly far from suggesting that we all ought to be by law responsible for one another in every way. Certainly there are limits to this idea. But I think conservatives do wrong to keep insisting that America is strong because it lets every man be an island.

Doubtless conservatives will tell me yes, we agree that it is good and right to care about others, but we believe that should left up to the individual, you see, for it is a greater moral good when it is not coerced by the government. There is a certain ring of moral truth in that, but on the other hand, at some point shouldn't all societies have ways of enforcing some sort of moral standard of caring about other people?

To be sure, no one is so omniscient as to know how to balance individual freedom with collective identity. Maybe in the Kingdom of God we somehow see both perfectly. After all, God is Trinity, and while each person in the Trinity is genuinely individual, yet the Trinity is a perfect collective, since the Trinity is One God. Maybe our failure to understand that paradox also leads to our failure to have a just political order.

But my point is that conservatives can't make a coherent political ideology out of pure individualism. It doesn't work, and it's immoral. Sowell's purist version of fairness as treating everyone exactly equally is not the ideal. When someone in your family is in trouble, you don't treat that person the same as everyone else; you go out of your way to help him.

Likewise, in any society that views itself in at least somewhat familial terms, certain people will be treated "unfairly" precisely because they are in need. Of course there are limits to this, but that doesn't mean we just throw out the whole idea of collective responsibility.

And if Sowell insists on throwing out the idea of collective responsibility, then I wonder if he is all that different from the intellectuals he is always criticizing. After all, like them, he seems willing to put abstract ideas before flesh and blood human beings.

Leap to Infinity

I can't resist blogging on a recent article I read over at Republic of Mathematics. In it, the author wrestles with that perennial question of whether abstract mathematical concepts are real.

He talks about the set of natural numbers. We all know this set intuitively: {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ...} You know what the "..." means. It means the set goes on forever. If I have any natural number n, you know that n + 1 is another natural number, so the set of natural numbers can't have a biggest number.

You can't get this set from finite sets. If you work in the realm of the finite, you stay there forever. It takes a leap of faith to get to the infinite. This is what mathematicians call making an axiom. It's a leap of faith, but it's certainly not a leap in the dark. We have an intuitive idea that we just formalize. No big deal, until we think about what it is we've just done.

What have we done? Have we described something real? Depends on what you mean by real, I suppose. What got me interested in this subject again was the religious idea that came out in the article I read:

So at the heart of mathematics lies an act of reification, a taking as real some thing – the set of natural numbers – that is an abstraction from our human activity of counting.

The process of reification is explicitly addressed in Buddhist thought, where it is generally thought to be not a good thing because it leads to the delusion of permanence for mental constructions that are bound to decay:

“All things and events, whether ‘material’, mental or even abstract concepts like time, are devoid of objective, independent existence. … things and events are ‘empty’ in that they can never possess any immutable essence, intrinsic reality or absolute ‘being’ that affords independence.” Dalai Lama (2005)

Contrast this with the Christian point of view, that the created world has real, independent existence, and that it is good, in the sense that it ought to be cared for and treated in the right way. As I blogged about earlier, Florensky had a lot to say about this.

Indeed, Florensky would say that it is precisely Trinitarian thought that leads us out of these labyrinths of epistemological despair. Human rationality, he says, is based on two things: the static and the dynamic. Clear thinking depends on things being static--A is not non-A--while proof, explanation, and learning depend on things being dynamic--A is also B. The combination of static and dynamic is found in Trinity--God is both Himself and not Himself, and by being not Himself He is found to be most fully Himself. But I digress.

The article ends with a rather nonchalant statement of pragmatism:

So in mathematics we treat the abstract construct of the set of natural numbers as a real object and – as if by magic – discover deep properties of this set.

On such myths mathematics and science thrive!

Just as modern science has reached the height of its self-confidence, believing itself to be the grand beacon of objective knowledge, mathematicians are here to cut the legs out from underneath that self-confidence!

Not that mathematicians think any differently about science than your typical modernist on a practical level. It's just that mathematicians seem to quite often be okay with accepting a world that isn't real and manipulating it anyway. Curiosity becomes its own reward.

Many of us will have a negative gut reaction to this attitude, and I think that's healthy. Curiosity is a wonderful thing, but is it really that wonderful if there's nothing real to be curious about?

Nevertheless, I do think that mathematics is mostly about mental abstractions created by us; they don't exist "out there" in some Platonic heaven. But they are real, because our brains our real! The concepts are as real as we are. Some craftsmen shape metal or wood; mathematicians shape the human mind. (And we are certainly not the only ones who do that.) That's about as real as it gets, if you ask me.

The Meaning of One and Three

It occurs to me that the doctrine of the Trinity is a stumbling block because it messes with our mathematical system of accounting for things in the world. But God is not a creature to be counted as such, so why do we expect that our conventions still apply?

If God is both One and Three, it is only because He cannot be accounted for by standard mathematics. In mathematics, One is not Three, and that's that. However, if One and Three are words that can have different meanings other than their mathematical meanings, then the doctrine of the Trinity is still possible.

This is one reason why I'm not such a mathematical Platonist these days. When it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity, I find myself constrained by reason to reject such a doctrine if, in fact, the system of mathematics I use every day is reality.

Yet the doctrine of the Trinity sums up a manifest experience of God, witnessed not only in scripture but in life. God was in Jesus, and Jesus was in God, and Jesus was God. No one has ever seen God or ever will, but if you've seen Jesus, you've seen God. This paradox is not a matter of abstract philosophical principles but of experience.

If I think of mathematics as a tool for describing reality, or even better, a system that helps me manage reality, then there really is nothing wrong with this paradoxical doctrine. God being both Three and One doesn't contradict real experience; in fact, it corresponds most exquisitely with real experience. But clearly God cannot be described (or managed) by the intellectual tools of (traditional) mathematics.

Postmodernism and Trinitarian Thought

I hear it all the time in church--we're living in a postmodern era, where truth is relative. People have forgotten where Truth, with a capital "T," comes from.

Not that modernism was well-received by Christians, either. Modernism, I am told, began with the skepticism of folks like Descartes, who decided to question everything he knew and build up a whole philosophy grounded in only those "self-evident" truths like, "I think, therefore I am."

(I'm glad I got to finally throw in that quote on this blog.)

This kind of skepticism seeks the "facts." Once you have the "facts," which are presumably unquestionable once firmly grasped, then it's a matter of interpreting the facts to gain sufficient theoretical knowledge of the universe.

Modern science derives from this, but so do a lot of other things. Skepticism about Christianity, for one. Modernism made humans the ultimate judge of truth. If something wasn't "self-evident" to us--either from just thinking about it or checking empirically--then it wasn't a fact, and if it wasn't a fact, then it bore a huge burden of proof. Christianity no longer sat so comfortably on the shoulders of faith.

Postmodernism, it's true, hasn't done much to bring people back to faith. What it has done, however, is call into question this whole notion of "self-evident" truths, pointing out that the way we see the world is largely shaped by our culture and personal experiences.

Modernism is still hanging on in a lot of circles, but postmodernism has pretty much made its way everywhere. One of my fellow math grads actually said that "science is just one perspective among many." Not even science, which has depended so heavily on modernism, can escape from the doubts of postmodernists.

But the problem with postmodernism is that it's not much more than a set of doubts about modernism, rather than a philosophy in itself. What could possibly fill the void?

Many evangelicals around me suggest that the only thing to fill the void is to go back to the revealed Truth of God found in the Bible. The problem I see with this is that the suspicions of both modernism and postmodernism really are quite penetrating. Like it or not, modernism brought with it a lot of scientific discoveries and historical criticism that raise huge doubts about the perfect accuracy of the Bible.

Perhaps the more crushing blow comes from the sheer number of different biblical interpretations there are. As hard as modern evangelicals try, we just can't help but read the Bible through layers upon layers of traditional interpretation that has been handed down to us.

But what, then, to take the place of modernism? How do we respond to postmodernism with something helpful?

It seems to me that the whole problem comes from a plain, one-dimensional approach to truth. The idea of obtaining revealed truth straight from the Bible is one-dimensional: truth goes from God to the Bible to you in a linear fashion.

Modernism, for all its skepticism, is no different. Humans observe nature, and "facts" come directly from nature to humans. By noticing patterns in these facts, we can ascertain truth.

In meditating on the Christian concept of the Trinity, I was struck by the idea that if God is not merely One, but also Three, why should we expect that truth would be merely one-dimensional?

After all, postmodernists have a point, don't they? Our thinking is always shaped by our culture. The way we perceive reality is shaped by our own experiences. There is, in fact, a trio of characters that interact in our pursuit of knowledge.

To be concrete, why don't I talk about the study of the Bible? The Bible is a collection of writings which exist independent of me. I cannot simply will the letters on its pages to change their form.

But when I read it, I am not simply being spoon fed "truth." The message I get will be shaped by my own mind. I may be prepared--whether through experiences or contemplation--to understand its words differently from someone else.

That's not the whole story. I am not on my own when I read the Bible; my culture reads with me. Sermons I hear, books I read, and conversations I have all shape what I am prepared to see in the text. Of course, the culture itself is shaped by the Bible, as people re-examine it. But the culture also shapes the Bible, in the sense that is shapes the message I receive from it.

That's not all, either. I shape the culture in which I live, and the culture shapes me. All of these different interactions are natural and inseparable. It is a trinity, if you will; three in one, and one in three. The Bible and I and the culture around me are ever three and ever one, and the search for meaning can only proceed with all three parts involved.

Each failed attempt at obtaining truth can be critiqued according to this model. Pure revelation cannot work, because it denies the role of self and culture. Attempts to evade self and culture are doomed from the start--they are inescapable, just as much as God the Father cannot be without the Son and the Spirit.

Modernism does not work because it denies the role of culture, and it seeks to trump up the self as impartial and objective (provided one is enlightened through skepticism). Postmodernism provides a critique of this, and I accept this critique.

In the place of Modernism, however, I would suggest "trinitarianism," the idea that truth is not a set of propositions revealed directly, nor a set of ideas derived from an objective study of the "facts," but that truth is the continually harvested fruit of a right relationship between the self, the thing studied, and that ever-present third party (e.g. one's culture, though one might think of something, or someone, else).

What, then, of doctrines? Doctrines are useful insofar as they promote this harmony. C. S. Lewis talked about how doctrine is not the destination, but it is a map toward the destination. Many people are too quick to line doctrines up beside one another, find them mutually exclusive, and therefore try to throw away one or the other; but I think this is not always the best approach. Ideas gradually evolve in their meaning as this "triune" process unfolds.

When I evaluate an idea about scripture (the doctrine of the Trinity, incidentally, is a perfect example), I must first see if it causes me to look for something I had not seen before. Then I must go and read the scriptures and analyze how this idea may have enlightened or conflicted with certain parts of my reading. Then I should share with other people what that experience was like, and let them share their own experience with me. The result of this will not be an artifact that we can put in a box labeled "truth." The result will be a better harmony between the three parts of my search for truth, and it is that harmony itself that is worth seeking.

Is this a shocking idea to Christians? Why are we so bent on having a tangible thing, like a statement, confession, or book, that we can call "Truth"? How do we come to know God the Father except through God the Son, by the power of God the Spirit? It is the same with all things. We don't know anything except through a three-fold harmony, and knowledge itself can be equated with this harmony.

Perhaps the doctrine of the Trinity can point us toward a vision of truth that is more attainable, a vision that appears to be needed in this time of uncertainty. I'd like to think so, anyway.

Meaning of Mathematics -- a Trinitarian Approach?

I just finished Mario Livio's Is God a Mathematician? a book about whether mathematics is invented or discovered. It was a nice read, filled with wonderful stories of mathematics throughout the ages--you know, just the thing that gets nerds like me excited.

The essential conclusion was nice and pragmatic. Livio thinks that the question of whether mathematics is invented or discovered is an ill-posed question, because it is both.

My feeling is that to most modern mathematicians this feels like common sense. We invent the mathematical concepts that we're going to study, and then we discover all the properties of, and relationships between, those concepts.

It's a little deeper than just inventing concepts at random, of course. These concepts typically find both motivation and application in the real world, whether we're talking about physics, economics, or whatever.

So that's great, but then, where did this question come from in the first place? One thing that's nice about Livio's book is how he traces the history of how this question was answered. There have been some really interesting answers.

The Platonists would say that math studies forms or objects that exist in some sort of reality beyond the world of the senses--a Platonic heaven, you might say. This idea has largely died out in the modern era, as people have discovered just how culturally unique certain mathematical concepts are.

For instance, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and far Eastern cultures developed sophisticated mathematics, but only the Greeks thought of the concept of prime numbers. The kinds of questions you ask shape the kinds of concepts you formulate. There are other reasons why Platonism has lost credibility, but this is a pretty good one.

Then there are the formalists, who say that basically math is all just a construction of the human mind that happens to be self-consistent, nothing more. Gödel's incompleteness theorems created some problems with that idea, but I won't get into the details.

My own view accords well with the kind of realism that Livio seems to espouse in the last chapter of his book--the actual definitions and axioms with which we create mathematics are technically invented, but nevertheless there is objective content to mathematical theorems.

However, I don't really like the rabbit holes he goes down to try to explain this. He cites many different people who give pseudo-scientific answers that somehow get linked to the theory of evolution. They try to make the mathematics we now have out to be some "chosen species" weeded out from a number of potential candidates.

But evolution works on very long time scales, whereas the time it took for modern mathematics to develop was, comparatively, not that long. Besides, often the development of mathematical theories has a lot more to do with beauty than with fitness.

A "beautiful" mathematical concept is a purely subjective idea, but it's no less real because of that. What's so surprising to me is how beautiful mathematics can be--and still truly describe the world we live in. Some will say, "Oh, well, that's just because the world we live in happened to have these certain symmetries." Well, then, why not marvel at how beautiful the world is!

As I see it, mathematics has to develop as something of a human invention--but always, of course, seeking something that is objectively real. In fact, all knowledge must progress this way. We can gain no knowledge of the world in prepackaged form--it all comes in the form of changes in ourselves.

I have every theological reason to believe this as I contemplate the Trinity. Truth is not found in one person but in three. Just the same, truth is not found in nature alone, but it is found in nature, in ourselves, and in the interaction between the two. It is all about the interplay.

Consider an ancient mathematician charged with developing some accounting scheme for commerce. He starts by observing people trade their goods. He realizes that he can quantify these transactions using whole numbers. This is because the things traded always behave according to the rules of his number system. I have two cows and three sheep; you trade me a cow for my sheep; now I have 2 + 1 = 3 cows. Whether its cows or sheep or whatever, my goods always seem to follow these basic properties of arithmetic.

So this mathematician has immersed himself in the nature of the world around him, and he has come up with a way to describe it, the whole numbers. These are defined by simple rules: basically, that each number can be obtained by adding 1 to itself enough times, and given any number, adding 1 to that number gets you another number. But from here it is possible to define the operations of subtraction, multiplication, and division, where applicable, and it is possible to start proving all sorts of theorems in arithmetic.

This description of nature has a life of its own, apart from nature, but always intimately linked to nature. So long as the goods in this mathematician's world continue to behave like cows and sheep (which add together just like whole numbers) all the theorems about whole numbers will also be applicable to trading real goods.

But suppose the ancient mathematician's task is different. Perhaps it is to record the yearly cycles of water levels of the local river. If he has never done any arithmetic beforehand, who is to say that he will start by developing the whole numbers? Maybe he will not choose to create a system of definite quantities at all, but merely record comparisons throughout the year. His mathematics will be all inequalities, rather than definite quantities.

So we see that there is always a third party involved, one to whom we are accountable to and who influences how we see the world.

In this way the road to truth is not a linear motion, but rather a dance between three parties, each of whom must influence and be influenced by the other two. Just as God is one in three, so each of us must learn to be one of three, and we must learn that knowledge only comes from making these three one.

I am a bit mystified by this myself, but there's something compelling about it.

What I mean really is that I don't think a mathematician should not be discouraged by the fact that mathematical concepts are an invention. As part of this triad consisting of human, nature, and whatever this third party may be (perhaps "context" will suffice), the mathematician must simply work on his relationship with the other two. He must both establish his own real identity and work to seek the other two with sincerity. His own identity comes from his invention of mathematical systems. His seeking the other two comes from testing whether these systems help him describe something real in nature, and in seeing whether they are relevant in the context he is given.

It would be an unhealthy relationship if one part of this triad was favored over the others, so a mathematician should feel free to be creative, but never so free that he is not grounded in some reality. While this may be common sense to many, I like how there is this possibility of real theological grounding for it. If God is Trinity, why should that not affect all that we do?

Is God a mathematician? If by mathematician you mean one who studies the mathematical constructions that he invents, then probably the answer is "no." (Does God need to invent such things and study them?)

But on the other hand, I do believe that the study of mathematics is so linked with His character that I would have to say that God seems to have constructed this universe with mathematicians in mind. Somehow, God loves a quantifiable universe.

In any case, I know this will all sound like a lot of esoteric nonsense to most people out there, but after all my purpose in all this is written at the top of the page. I thought, therefore I blogged.

Trinity

So I've added an RSS feed to my blog, so that you can listen to sermons from my church in Charlottesville, Trinity Pres. I thought I'd highlight yesterday's Easter sermon, which was fantastic.

There's a lot more to Easter than just this tradition that long ago a man named Jesus rose from the dead. The whole point of Easter is that this Resurrection is a foreshadowing of what life, the world, and even the whole universe is really about--redemption, glorification, new creation.

Incidentally, a friend and I were at the Mellow Mushroom when John Lennon's Imagine came on. He asked me if I took offense at the song--"imagine there's no heaven" and all that. I said I don't exactly agree with the song, but there's something to be appreciated about it.

After all, imagine if heaven weren't simply a destination. Imagine heaven coming down to earth. That's what Easter is all about. I suppose John Lennon didn't quite get it, but he might've been closer than a lot of us, after all.

It's a busy time of year for me in grad school... not much time for blogging. But I will be back more often when I have some free time. Soon enough...

*Edit: incidentally, the Easter sermon hasn't been posted, so if you were hoping to hear it right away, I guess you'll have to wait a few days.*