Under the Fir Tree

Divine simplicity can sound like one of those doctrines theologians invented because they had too much parchment and not enough supervision. God has no parts. Fine. We hear “parts” and think of arms and legs, pieces fitted together, something assembled. Of course God isn’t like that. Problem solved. Except that isn’t what the doctrine is really saying. It’s saying something far more unsettling. It means there’s nothing in God that is merely one thing about Him . God doesn’t possess goodness as though goodness were a quality added to whatever God already is. He doesn’t have love. He doesn’t have truth. He doesn’t have life, wisdom, justice, mercy, power, or holiness. He is. And in Him these aren’t separate realities arranged together in perfect proportion. His love isn’t one part of Him negotiating with His justice. His mercy doesn’t occasionally persuade His holiness to loosen the rules. His power isn’t a capacity He might exercise while His wisdom decides whether it would be prudent....

Borges understood something unnerving about us: we don’t simply live in the world. We live inside what we’ve decided the world means. We name things. Sort them. Draw borders around them. We build theories, institutions, political systems, theologies, diagnoses, stories. We make maps because the world is too large to hold in the mind all at once. We need the maps. The trouble begins when we forget we’re holding one. St. Paul puts the whole problem into a few words: “For now we see in a mirror dimly . . . Now I know in part.” I know in part. There’s humility in that sentence, but no surrender of truth. Paul doesn’t say we know nothing. He doesn’t say the mirror lies. He says it’s dim. We see something real. We just don’t see all of it. And nearly every human way of understanding carries the same temptation. We discover something true and, because it’s true, begin asking it to explain too much. Economics reveals something about us, and soon everything has a price. Psychology discovers wo...

There’s a comforting idea that most of us carry around, especially those of us who like arguments. If people only knew. If they could see the evidence. If the facts were undeniable. If God would tear open the sky for five minutes, settle the matter, and then let everybody get on with things. Surely then we’d believe. Bertrand Russell once imagined the question being put to him from the other side of death: Why hadn’t he believed? His reported answer was essentially a complaint to God: Why didn’t you give me better evidence? It’s a formidable question, and not a foolish one. If God wants to be known, why remain hidden enough to be doubted? Laurence Cosse’s A Corner of the Veil doesn’t so much answer Russell as disturb the assumption beneath the question. What if better evidence came? What if God’s existence ceased to be a matter of probability or argument? What if the veil were pulled aside just far enough that disbelief became intellectually impossible? Would we actually become differ...

A man opens his Bible at the kitchen table. The cereal bowl sits there like a little domestic altar; beside it, a bill folded once, twice, with the neat cruelty of a summons. His phone stains the room with that bluish light of hospitals and morgues. He wants guidance. Reassurance. A sentence clean enough to carry into the office like a heel of bread hidden in his coat. There’s no wickedness in that hunger. God knows it. God has pity on it. But it’s too little for the dreadful book lying open beneath his hands. For the lie underneath his desire is older than his fear and more patient than his prayers. It whispers that Scripture is a holy object placed politely inside a world already explained: matter below, God above, religion indoors, politics outdoors, death waiting at the end of the lane, and private meaning crouched in the middle like a poor man warming his fingers over a stolen fire. But the truth is stranger, and far less obedient. Scripture presumes an opened heaven, a creation c...

At the start of the day, before others are fully awake, many of us reach for our phone and thereby let a hundred voices enter before we've spoken one true word. The habit feels innocent, even necessary. You call it staying informed, staying ready, staying in control. But the lie's older than the screen: that the mind exists to range without anchor, to sample realities without belonging to any of them, to remain sovereign by refusing to kneel. But the mind wasn't made for endless motion. It was made for truth, which is the order of reality as held in God. A mind unbound to truth doesn't become free; it becomes available to whatever shouts loudest. So the first task isn't stimulation but consecration . The mind must be bound, or it'll be taken. We resist that word because “bound” sounds like diminishment. We think freedom means open options, unlocked doors, the right never to settle. But that's not freedom; it's drift with better branding. A ship isn'...

What sort of question are you asking when you ask a question? That’s the first question, and it matters more than it sounds. Because not every sentence with a question mark is really a question. Some are traps. Some are speeches in costume. Some are smoke machines for fake depth. And some are honest doors. A genuine question is a real opening to truth. A pseudo-question is a question-shaped sentence that's doing something else. That’s the hinge. The difference isn't punctuation. It's intention. Grammar's the clothing; the act is the man. A genuine question has three marks. First, it names a real matter: What caused the delay? Second, it leaves that matter truly open: I don’t yet know, or at least I don’t know fully. Third, it wants fulfillment: evidence, clarification, an answer, a correction. In plain English, a real question says, “I’m ready to learn what is so.” A pseudo-question says, “I’m ready to use the form of inquiry without paying the price of inquiry.” And...

Most people are first told that philosophy is worth studying because it teaches “critical thinking,” as if its highest service were to sharpen the mind into a better tool. That sounds plausible in a world of exams, markets, reports, and systems. But the lie beneath it is thin and mechanical: it treats the intellect as an instrument for handling problems rather than as a power ordered toward truth. Philosophy is worthy of study because it refuses that reduction. It asks not merely how a thing works, but what it is; not merely whether a conclusion follows, but whether the first principles are sound; not merely what can be done, but what is worth doing, and why anything should count as worth at all. The mind wasn’t made only to manage. It was made to behold. Therefore philosophy isn’t an academic luxury. It’s the soul’s training in reality. Every other science takes some region of being as its field and, rightly, disciplines itself to that field. Physics studies motion and matter. Biology...