Fides ex Auditu

In the midst of their perilous climb to the heights of Mount Doom, Frodo and Sam stop to ask themselves “what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into” Is their story, they wonder, one that will have a good ending or a sad one? Both hobbits agree that, in any real story, the reader may guess what kind of tale it is, but “the people in [the tale] don’t know. And you don’t want them to.” At this point in their quest to destroy the One Ring and save Middle-earth, it seems – at best – unlikely that their story will end well. And yet Frodo and Sam are not discouraged from pressing on, for whether their story has a good-ending or a sad one is not ultimately up to them. What is up to them is to stay the course, even through the darkest pages, and not to close the book too early by giving up.  Although they carry on, Frodo and Sam do not, in fact, know what sort of tale they’ve fallen into. We, on the other hand, at least those of us who are familiar with The Lord of the Rings do, as did its auth...

We, as humans, love to argue; and whether we’ve studied the science of how to argue or not, we all basically know how to do it, on the evidence of the fact that we argue about all of the things, all of the time. (What I just made, in case you missed it, was an argument!) Regardless of what we’re arguing about, all arguments rely on the same fundamental principle, which is this: when all the premises of an argument are true, the conclusion must also be true. It cannot be false. An example: All Easter eggs are filled with candy. There is a basket of Easter eggs on the kitchen table. Therefore, those eggs in the basket are filled with candy. The truth of the conclusion derives from the truth of the premises, unless, of course, you don’t fill your Easter eggs with candy, in which case, you can substitute candy for flax seeds or whatever else, and the argument still holds its water.  We love to argue, and we argue about everything: from how should fill Easter eggs to matters of global i...

No matter on which side of the political aisle we may fall, even a cursory study of world history and a quick glance at the events of recent years and months is enough to make us skeptical of kings and those who seek to become them. “Power tends to corrupt,” Lord Acton famously said, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  Yet from beginning to end the portrait of Jesus that Saint Luke paints in his Passion Narrative is nothing other than the royal portrait of a King. Christ tells his disciples to find a colt “on which no one has ever sat”, and he is later laid to rest in a tomb “in which no one had yet been buried”. Both evoke a King’s privilege. As Jesus enters Jerusalem, the crowds cry out, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord,” while the Cross on which he hangs declares him the “King of the Jews”.  Jesus Christ is most certainly a King, and his power is absolute, for even at his Name “every knee should bend, of those in heaven on earth and under the ea...