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.
Continue reading → Outline of an Approach to Christian Apologetics
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.
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.
Continue reading → The Generative Excess: Soul, Dream, and Idea
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.
Continue reading → Carceral Nation: Twenty Years from Blog Post to Book
In 2004, at a physics conference in Dublin, Stephen Hawking stood before his peers and announced he had been wrong for nearly thirty years. The specific error concerned whether black holes permanently destroy the information they consume, a claim Hawking had championed since 1976 against some of the sharpest minds in theoretical physics. He paid off a bet with Caltech physicist John Preskill, handing over a baseball encyclopedia, a gift selected because, unlike a black hole (or so Hawking had argued), an encyclopedia allows its information to be recovered. The audience laughed. The moment was graceful and self-aware. It was also one of the most important intellectual acts of the twenty-first century, though most people missed the real lesson.
Continue reading → The Genius of Getting It Wrong: What Hawking Teaches Us About Knowing
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