Today is Christmas and I'm a little disappointed that I started out with bloviating about liberalism.
On this day, after a Christmas Eve celebration at St. John's with so many people I love, Carole and I find ourselves talking about what we believe and what we don't, and I nearly always wind up with one person, James Carse.
Carse is a student of religion generally, which is why I think he goes further than anyone else in capturing the dilemma of those raised as Christians or Jews but who balk at a lot, a whole lot, of the theology (in the case of Christianity). Here ia a recent interview with Carse on Salon that captures where he's coming from.
And what's missing from that interview is his profound spirituality, a spirituality of everyday life. I have written a lot about him in the past (see the entries under "Carse" as a category, listed on the first page of the blog), and he has helped me enormously, encouraged me to keep on trying to make sense of things "religiously", when the conventional ideas of "God" just don't help anymore.
