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The Finite Lens: How a Fragile Life Gives Shape to an Infinite Universe

The question arrives early and stays late: what does it mean to live a finite, fragile life inside an infinite, eternal universe? Every serious person encounters this problem, usually around the age when the body first betrays its limits, and no one resolves it cleanly. Theology dissolves the question by denying its premise. Science measures the mismatch with such precision that the human side of the equation vanishes into decimal places. And the popular existentialist answers, the ones printed on coffee mugs and quoted in commencement speeches, have been sanded down so thoroughly that they function as anesthesia rather than analysis.

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Outline of an Approach to Christian Apologetics

This essay originated as a reply to David Boles in the comments section of Saugstad’s first guest article, “Postmodernism and Christianity.” It is published here as a standalone essay with the author’s permission.

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Seeing Around Corners

The phrase “seeing around corners” gets tossed around boardrooms and strategy meetings as though it were a compliment, a kind of secular beatification for the executive or thinker who got there first. But the phrase deserves closer scrutiny, because what it actually describes is a discipline, and one that most people refuse to practice because the conclusions it produces are uncomfortable.

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The Generative Excess: Soul, Dream, and Idea

There are three things you cannot show me. You cannot open your hand and reveal your soul. No technology exists to replay your dream from last night with any fidelity. And no surgeon can extract from your skull the moment a thought first assembled itself into an idea. Each of these phenomena exists, if it exists at all, only as a first-person event, invisible to external observation, resistant to measurement, and stubbornly private. That shared inaccessibility is worth taking seriously, because it suggests that the most important operations of human consciousness happen in a place that science can describe from the outside but never enter.

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Carceral Nation: Twenty Years from Blog Post to Book

In December 2006, I published an article on this blog about mass incarceration, racial disparities in the American prison system, and a concept I was trying to name: the carceral citizen, the person whose freedom exists in a state of permanent conditional revocation. The article was one entry among many in the Boles Blogs Network, which at its peak ran fourteen blogs across a range of subjects. One of those fourteen was called Panopticonic.

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