Pastor Foltz is Pastor Emeritus of Saint James Lutheran Church in Gettysburg, PA and author of the the Frontline Study content.
Recently, a wonderfully kind young man, whom I respect greatly, was explaining to me why he was not religious. He indicated he thought scholars would come up with a unified theory in the next 25 years. Obviously, he regarded me as an old, traditional kind of fellow who lived in the past as he gently […]
If the history of humanity is read as the search for truth, and if that search involves making common sense of the kaleidoscope of sensory data that constantly bombards us, and if making common sense involves coming to agreement on not only fact but also the meaning and purpose of those facts, and if our […]
I find that I have trapped myself, and you, by examining the conflict between power and love during Holy Week. The church year narrative uses this period to present the ultimate confrontation of these truth claims. Current news reports remind us we find ourselves in the same situation in real life. The Holy Week narrative […]
More than ever I hear from friends in academia, business, and government that they are accused of not knowing how the world operates whenever they advocate for options including sharing and caring. The accusation always implies that a loving action is naive, because only power brings success. We are dealing here with two fundamentally different […]
My initial plan was to offer a brief response to what modern election campaigns have done to our understandings of truth and falsehood. That all went up in smoke when fake news and alternative facts became tactics for governing. Just last week, Time magazine’s feature article examined the effects of a president who openly acknowledges […]
In the last lesson, I suggested the crisis in language that has led to our present inability to separate what is true and false in public conversation might have first been observed in Orwell’s political newspeak and Ellul’s technological commonplaces. I think the crisis deepened with what Uwe Poerksen (1995) labeled “plastic words.” These are […]
Because we are confronted every blasted day with a new manipulation of truth, it might help to trace the development that has led to this perilous situation. Many believe it was first brought to our attention by George Orwell who introduced “newspeak” in his novel 1984 (1949). This is a fictional language created by the […]
Any lengthy discussion of truth probably contains a reference to Diogenes walking around Athens with a lamp to search for one honest man. Chances are that is about as far as it goes. Few realize the Greek thinker was a Cynic who thought truth involves how you live as well as what you say. He […]
We are just beginning to appreciate how much the huge databases modern technology makes available are affecting our thoughts about truth. Most of us are aware that merchants use them to sell their products. If we look for a pair of shoes online, ads for others pop up on our Facebook for several days. We […]
It does not take long to see that John’s Gospel speaks directly to our situation. In one of its critical scenes (John 18), Jesus and Pontius Pilate face off over the definition of truth. The confrontation could have taken place in our own White House. Pilate asks Jesus if he is a threat to his […]
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