What This Blog is About

The topic of God is immensely interesting and important, I've always thought. What could matter more than whether God exists and what God is like? And yet, most people get just enough information on the subject to be immunized against further thinking about it. They go to Sunday School, or maybe listen to friends who do, or perhaps go to church, and get some ideas about God from those experiences. And usually, those ideas last them for the rest of their lives, for good or ill. At whatever age most of us stop learning math, we understand that there's a lot more math where that came from that we'll never get to, and that the math we'll never master ourselves is a genuine area of expertise, and probably quite important. But in the area of theology (thinking about God), most of us are quite convinced that our stock of ideas is pretty much all that's worth considering.

This is also true several levels up. I taught Philosophy of Religion from textbooks whose list of topics and contents made sense only within a Western Christian context, and whose authors seemed oblivious to the fact that there are other religions with other ideas, questions, and answers. I started teaching Comparative Religion to get away from that. Since religion and theology fascinate me, I kept reading in many traditions, and realized that there are many more thinkers and thoughts about God (even in the West) than you could ever guess either from going to church for your whole life, or from reading Philosophy of Religion texts and anthologies.

My own thinking about God changed as a result--I feel for the better, much better--and it continues to evolve. I want to use this blog to record and think through ideas about God that I find helpful, and to critique popular or commonly held ones that I think are wrong. I hope it will help you to think through your own ideas about God, and perhaps give you some new ideas that you may find helpful.