Musings from an Atheist Theologian

NOTE: This Interlude, previously sitting in my drafts, was intended to be posted to coincide with the holiday season. I apologize for its belatedness, and can assure you that this will not affect the release schedule outlined in "New Year, New Plans." Oh, Christmastide. There are a lot of images that each of us associates with this magical time of the year. Mine are grounded in growing up in New England and what I would see during winter as I did: ice skating. Trees. Filthy snow. Cold wet feet. Shoppers. Lovers. Assholes. Most Christians, be they fundamentalist or mainstream, naturally come with a Sunday school-appropriate image of the holiday's origins. Elizabeth Cunningham aptly summarizes it in the opening lines of her magnificent  Daughter of the Shining Isles  (sorry, Monkfish Book Publishing, this will always be the title of The Maeve Chronicles ' first installment for me): You have all heard of his birth in Bethlehem in a stable [...] You know the story of the...

Hello, readers! (And by readers, I mean, like, maybe two or three people, tops.) As of last week, we have entered the Year of Your Lord 2023, and this is typically a time when people write about all the big stuff they're gonna do in the future. "New year, new me" is the most popular turn of phrase related to this phenomenon. The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word "future" (apparently a noun, according to the confusing rules of the English language) in several ways. The blanket definition basically says that the future is the indefinite time yet to come or something that will happen during that time. Your humble author has had plans for the future many times in his life. Each time, they were different. Some goals were loftier than others, and some were just plain unrealistic. To him, and no doubt to many, the future is a constantly changing animal. There's always hope that there will be mostly good things and fewer bad things, but that's the ot...