Midlife Meditation

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia attending a Red Mass in 2012. Antonin Scalia died a week ago, and the repercussions of his passing have only just begun to play out. Our historically unproductive Senate announced immediately that it but hold true to form on the appointment of any nominee President Obama might put forward: it would refuse to act, preferring instead to leave the seat vacant for over a year, in hopes that the next President will be Republican, and appoint another hardshell conservative. The President, on the other hand, stated plainly that he will put forward a highly qualified nominee, and he expects the Senate to fulfill its Constitutional duty of advising and casting a vote on that nominee. Meanwhile, across America there has been a full spectrum of reactions, from sheer delight on the left to cries of conspiracy and even accusations of murder on the right. In the press, legal scholars have weighed in on Scalia's significance from a host of perspecti...

  There's a polite knock on the door. I set aside the project I was working on, walk over to the door, and outside find two neatly dressed young men, nametags on their pockets, black books in their hands, eager to share the Good Word with me. The nametags clearly label them as Mormon missionaries, and I've seen them bicycling around the neighborhood for months, so I'm not surprised by this. They've probably had far lots of doors shut in their faces, many of them rudely, and it must be wearing on them; yet somehow they maintain their good humor and optimism. Before they can say anything more than "Hello," I tell them this really aren't going to want to talk with us. "Are you sure?" asks one of them, struggling to hide his disappointment. "Have you ever talked to someone about the Mormon faith?" "Yes, I have," I reply, "and really, this isn't a house you want to spend time on. But good luck." I smile and cl...

I never expected to bump into Randy. It was the summer of 1984. I was scouring the Pacific Northwest for my first teaching job, driving for interviews on the coast, in the rain forest, the desert, the mountains, in both Oregon and Washington. In between these trips, I frequently stopped off in Salem to visit my friend Scott, occasionally sleeping on his couch. During one of these visits, Scott introduced me to a friend he'd made in law school, who, to Scott's surprise, I'd actually known for nine years. Randy was a fellow alumnus of Philomath High School, where he'd graduated the year before me. He'd gone to college somewhere in Portland, taken a year off or something, then come to Willamette. Randy had always been an irritating person to have a conversation with, stubbornly worrying at an argument until I felt like chewing off my oratorical leg, which made him a perfect candidate for the legal profession. In the years since I'd last seen Randy, he had ho...

  This. Is. A. Book.   So spoke the seminary professor after throwing a Bible to the floor and stomping on it. I never witnessed this act--it was years before my arrival at Perkins--but it was a story the professors I knew loved to tell. I don't remember the name of this particular professor, but I wholeheartedly agree with the point he was making to a shocked classroom of East Texan Methodists: idolatry is a sin. Anything besides God can be made into an idol, including, perhaps especially, this book. And yet Christians of every persuasion routinely assign it more weight, power, and authority than the God it supposedly tells them about--the one this very book quotes as saying not to make idols of anything, including books.   You may, like those East Texan seminarians, be in a state of shock that I am casting aspersions on this book. You may consider it the Word of God. You may even consider it the inerrant Word of God. If that's the case, it's best you s...