Looking back over this series, I realize how much I was compelled to continue, because the news every last morning provided a new set of lies spewed out by public officials to whom we had given our trust. That compulsion also was fired by the large number of people who repeatedly told me this disregard […]
The Bible describes salvation as God’s attempt to save humanity from self-destruction and sees this, in part, as unveiling the truth that humans fail to discern. From beginning to end, two of the primary ways the scriptures explain our failure are that our violence and greed get in the way. The prophet John attempted to […]
Try as hard as I might, I find I cannot let go of this rather disjointed investigation of truth. Every time I think I find a way out, another unanswered question disturbs me. My intention was to slip away with a lesson on truth and irony, perhaps beginning with E. C. Bentley’s “Between what matters […]
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 […]
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