Pascal, Ash Wednesday, and the Hidden God
In the Anglican Ash Wednesday ritual, we pray for the grace of true repentance. Repentance means to turn around, which obviously means you’re going to be looking in a different direction, seeing...
View ArticleBecoming Neo-Pascalian: An Indiana Jones Kind of Faith?
Earlier we took a quick look at a scientific experiment conducted by Pascal in 1646, and we considered the ways that that experiment led him to two general “laws” of knowledge. If we want to know what...
View ArticleBecoming Neo-Pascalian: Fire
When Pascal died, those who prepared his body for burial found sewn into the lining of his jacket a small piece of paper. Apparently he carried it with him everywhere he went, transferring it from...
View ArticleBecoming Neo-Pascalian: The Third Order
In our last Pascalian conversation, I left you with fire. And if you’ve had an experience like Pascal’s, perhaps you feel that all this blather about science and reason and blah, blah, blah is highly...
View ArticleBecoming Neo-Pascalian: From Gambling Table to Altar
One of the concepts Pascal is best known for is his Wager, a longer fragment in Pensées (f. 418). Here Pascal brings his formidable mathematical mind, operating halfway between the gambling table and...
View ArticleBecoming Neo-Pascalian: The First Step of Make-Believe Faith
We are left with this all-important question: how do we get faith? How do we “make belief”? If we’re not lucky or blessed enough to have a Damascus-road experience, and, as Pascal tells us, we can’t...
View ArticleBecoming Neo-Pascalian: The Second Step Toward a Make-Believe Faith
I want to begin this part of the conversation acknowledging a comment to my last post about a sense of need. Nick astutely writes: My big problem with “God shaped hole” arguments is that it seems to me...
View ArticleBecoming Neo-Pascalian: Diminishing Your Passions or Increasing Your Hunger
In our last Neo-Pascalian conversation, I indicated that fragment 418 held yet another clue to the business of make-believe faith. There he addresses the one who “seeks a cure”—who recognizes his or...
View ArticleBecoming Neo-Pascalian: Setting Our Hearts
I’ve been reading my way through the Old Testament again and have reached the sad, sad beginning of the Great Brokenness. The tales of David—hero and king, poet and warrior, man of passion and lover of...
View ArticleBecoming Neo-Pascalian: Praying Like Elijah
“What a long way it is between knowing God and loving him!” (f. 377) Ultimately, Pascalian spirituality is about that “long way.” Pascal wrote to an audience that was full of knowing about God. A...
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