Since we're barreling headlong into a national election season, all of us are likely to hear a heightened number of conspiracy theories, often invoked to vilify political rivals or people who don't serve the interests of some party or politician.  As such, some thoughts on conspiracies and conspiracy theories strike me as in order--to help us sort through when we should take conspiracy claims seriously, and when we should be skeptical. Let's start with what we mean by a conspiracy. Generally, a conspiracy exists when a group of people collude (work together in secret) to impact events in ..read more

For most of my adult life, I’ve been both a philosopher and fiction writer. Through both, I’ve tackled the deep questions that most engage me, especially questions of faith, social justice, human sexuality, and violence. The imminent release of my debut novel, So Eden Sank to Grief, has got me thinking about the relationship between these two things that have so shaped the course of my life.   Two Distinct Roles Fiction and philosophy are two distinct approaches to engaging with questions central to understanding the human condition—questions about our values and basic assumptions, about ..read more

The previous except from my forthcoming novel, So Eden Sank to Grief, touched on the hiddenness of God. But God is not the only thing that's hidden in our lives--and it's not the only thing that's hidden in the novel. In fact, hiddenness is one of the recurring themes. The passage below captures an intimate moment between the main characters, Caleb and Sally. It's an interlude of quiet after a harrowing "underworld" journey (in which they touch up against something the alien creators of their artificial world are hiding) and before all hell breaks loose. It's a moment when the hiddenness of Ca ..read more

 In anticipation of the release of my novel, So Eden Sank to Grief, on February 27, I thought I'd do a series of posts extracting some tidbits and snippets from the novel, especially ones that connect with this blog's theme of wrestling honestly with religion and God. My first snippet, quite short, is inspired by the outcome of tonight's divisional playoff game between my beloved Buffalo Bills and the ever-irritating (if talented) Kansas City Chiefs. If there is one silver lining to the Bills' loss, it is that this snippet still remains fully relevant. Here it is: There are moments when ..read more

I've come to love Friday Night Lights: cheering for my high school football team and (more important, since my daughter's in the band) for the pride of Stillwater, the Pioneer Marching Band. I love the fact that I am united with a whole bunch of people I don't know in a shared set of rituals, cheering for OUR team, cheering on OUR band, watching the dance/pom squad and the cheer squad show off their competition routines, cheering for all the young people who have accomplished great things in our community and are brought to the crowd's attention during breaks in game play. You know what wouldn ..read more

Yesterday, Oklahoma State Secretary of Education Ryan Walters asked the Oklahoma State Board of Education to revoke the teaching license of Summer Boismier, who was recently fired from Norman Public Schools for sharing with her students a link to the Brooklyn Public Library (which has recently made access to their digital collection free to teens across the US as a way to help mute the impact of various book-banning efforts at public school libraries). Here's a copy of his letter: Even if I'm not impressed with the substance of his letter, the structure of it is pretty nice--worthy of emul ..read more

The New Book Banning Surge   Recently, some parents here in Stillwater, OK, have started following a national trend of trying to get books pulled from school library shelves for being inappropriate. Banning books from school libraries has seen an unprecedented rise in the last year or two, and the evidence indicates that targets for removal are disproportionately books that feature diverse characters and themes, especially books by or about LGBT+ persons and people of color, and books that wrestle with issues of race in America. Accordingto Education Week, in the recent wave 41% of books ..read more

Let us consider some alternative versions of what happened behind the scenes in the FBI and DOJ prior to and leading up to the execution of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. Which version is the most likely or most plausible? Version 1--the Bumbling Idiocy Version: “Let’s find a judge who’ll sign off on a legally unjustified, politically-motivated fishing expedition--um, that is, search warrant--against an ex-President! With a nefarious scheme of this scale and with this many people involved, there’s no way the legal fishiness of our rationale will be exposed! It’s not like Trump will start scr ..read more

 On July 28, 2022, the Oklahoma State Board of Education voted to lower the accreditation status of both Tulsa Public Schools and Mustang Public Schools to the status of “accredited with warning.” In both cases, it was because of an alleged violation of Oklahoma’s new (as of 2021) law, HB 1775, originally developed in order to preclude the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools (although what the law specifically prohibits—enumerated below—is not what critical race theory, a field of legal study developed in law schools, actually says). I would like to spend a few minutes re ..read more

Today, at Emmaus Church in Northfield, Minnesota, a serve was held in memory of my Uncle, Rune Engebretsen, who died a few months ago. In his memory, I share the following reflections. In Memory of Rune Engebretsen My much-loved uncle, Rune Engebretsen (always “Onkel Rune” to me), passed away last week. A Scandinavian Studies professor and a skilled translator (from Norwegian/Danish into English), his special interest in Kierkegaard created a distinctive intellectual connection between us that I didn’t have with other members of my family. To oversimplify it, he was the relative I could alwa ..read more