theodicy

Early last night, as I passed through Manhattan's Columbus Circle subway station on the way home, there was a beggar sitting and hunched awry at the bottom of the steps to the A train. His legs were splayed around him, as if in a strange circle, his hands raised. His right hand held a cup.

Tonight, Asteroid 2012 DA14 passes between us and our moon. Oh, you didn't know that? What an Ash Wednesday and Valentine's Day we would have had if its trajectory had been different. The asteroid is about 150 feet wide and will miss us by a distance less than a round trip between New York City

This Martin Luther King, Jr., Day should unsettle us more than usual. It's not because President Obama is celebrating his inauguration today. It's because, almost fifty years since the composition of King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail, his greatest epistle to the Church, we risk more than ever before being the people he accuses of

Dude. Major conservative evangelical backlash on Sandy Hook, blaming it on lack of school prayer. The theodical ramifications are substantial: is this God, who enables and endorses the slaughter of children? Heavy duty. It's an old saw often used by evangelicals, but let's use it anyway: what would Jesus do?

The Sandy Hook shootings still haven't really sunk in, nor should they. This is the nature of trauma, this unique kind of wound. If we were to comprehend it, it would make us inhumane, since events like this are something that humans cannot comprehend. We can only stand (or perhaps our legs have already given