LOL at myself

Many reasons to do so, but the latest from today...
I saw a recommendation for me pop up on Amazon.com, When Truth Gives Out, by Mark Richard. Well, being in a summer fiction mindset, and knowing (I figured amazon was omniscient) that the great short story writer and novelist Mark Richard is among my favs and a must-have of anything he writes, I one-clicked it and waited eagerly for UPS.
It comes today.
It is, instead, by philosopher Mark Richard of Tufts University. It is published by Oxford University Press. I had seen that, but that the other Mark Richard must have fallen on hard publishing times (jk, oxford).

So I peruse it and it takes me back ironically to my graduate school in fiction writing days when I was immersed in all things pomo and deconstructive, socialy constructive and had written and delivered a paper of my own at a philosophy academic gathering (in, more irony, Robicheaux's cajun country of lafayette, louisiana) on philosopher Geoffrey Hartmann and had an interesting panel with some delivering their papers on Rorty and pragmatism....

Of course, now being a minister, issues of truth and relativity and propositional statements and all that ought to be of importance. and they are, of course (of course just how important is the very subject of the book I am surmising as it is of so much theological method too).

And just the night before I was reading the lastest issue of Christianity Today (see post below) and another article in there about the very issues of the Richard book, and about the rise again of apologetics, especially among Evangelical Reformed it seems, and of the answers or responses by new philosophers to the new atheist movement too.

So, okay, God, I am listening. You've hit me upside the head with a book I hadn't been planning to read. Just good thing I have already had my dose of fiction this month (see post below). I suspect anyone who is into UUism and UU Christianity as I am should be interested to get an update on all this; it does lurk in our shadows of our dealings with other UUs and other Christians. (why talk about faith with Christians, the line goes, if they won't go down the road of logic and reason and debating the very existence of God or something Godlike/lite).

It is a slender book (but then again one summer I got through Ulysses and another summer I got through Whitehead's Process and Reality, still love his sentence: God is that factor in the universe that relates the what-is to the what-is-not-yet). So stay tuned. I will report back from the fields of relativity. I already like one blurb on the book that talks about how you can hold truth as relative and still claim one truth can be objectively better than another...and that not knowing ourselves how a truth will play out in the world in the future inherently makes truth relative (for us anyway, for God might be another matter, but then I looked in the index and didn't see any reference to God or theology, which may mean it will be all about it).



Type rest of the post here