Author: Roland

  • A web of links

    I’ve been working on a number of larger projects over the past few months, and so haven’t had the opportunity to post anything in a while. I hope to be finishing up with some of these in the next few weeks. In the meantime, I’ve collected a number of interesting links (mostly videos) for your… →

  • Fear of the Lord

    Throughout Scripture — both Old and New testaments — God’s people are told to fear him, which at first glance seems to be an odd response to a God full of grace and love. Perhaps the most puzzling statement comes when the people of Israel first meet God at the mountain in Exodus 20. Notice… →

  • Dialogue on God’s interaction with the universe

    Bob: How can an immaterial God interact with a material universe? Alice: The question itself needs to be questioned before we can answer it. Bob: How so? It seems like a fairly straightforward question. Alice: Well, consider the word “interact.” God does not interact with anything. To interact requires action going in both directions, and… →

  • Patience

    A while ago my church was doing a series on the fruit of the Spirit, listed in Galatians 5:22-23. I did the sermon on patience, and below are the notes for this. The audio can be found at my church’s website. In addition to reading the list of the fruit in Galatians, we also read… →

  • McTaggart and meta-time

    There is what I take to be an error common among my fellow Thomists regarding change and certain theories of time. Put tersely, this error says that the B-theory of time is committed to the Parmenidian denial of change. I had decided to write something about it, but after doing a bit of research, it… →

  • We don’t do God

    In a dialogue with the late Christopher Hitchens, John Haldane outlines why he thinks religion is crucial as a foundational political principle in societies made up of diverse cultures, religions, etc. Very roughly his position is (1) that the governing of such a society must be built around certain core notions like the respect for… →

  • The real distinction

    Whenever we have two concepts, A and B, we can ask to what extent the things they pick out in reality are distinct. If they pick out distinct realities, then we say that there is a real distinction between them. If they pick out the same reality, however, then we say that there is a… →

  • Essentially ordered series

    The notion of a series, or chain or regress, comes up a number of times in philosophical discussions. In this post, we’re going formalize the notion in general, and then develop this into a formalization of essentially ordered series in particular. Intuitively, a series is when we start with some member and from there we trace through… →

  • Faith and hope

    Our goal here is to unpack the notion of faith so as to overcome confusions in modern thinking on the topic. Lacking a good understanding of the notion actively prevents many people, both Christian and non-Christian, from understanding Scripture. In this post, we will begin an account of faith and give examples from Scripture and… →

  • The threefold whole

    In his Metaphysics Δ Aristotle says there are two senses of the term “whole”: Whole means that from which none of the things of which it is said to consist by nature are missing; and that which contains the things contained in such a way that they form one thing. The first sense corresponds to our usage… →