Ronald V. Huggins

The thing that makes ideologies dangerous is that those  ensnared by them don't know they're dangerous,  which makes them dangerous too!

I was a third grader at Saint Joseph's School in Butte, Montana. That was back in the day when we still wore uniforms, the boys a blue shirt, salt and pepper corduroys, and a blue neck ties with SJS stiched into them. The girls dresed similarly only in blue dresses with straps that went up over their shoulders instead of pants. As a Catholic, Kennedy was "our" president. The first Roman Catholic to become the President of the United States. A real step forward in a country always dominated by WASPS [White Anglo-Saxon Protestants] who had traditionally run everything in the country while at the same time often hating and fearing us because of our suspected loyalty to the Pope over allegience to our own country. At the time I only knew that wherever I had lived Cathoics were in a marked minority. So I was very proud that "one of us" had risen to such heights. As I recall we even had a bronze plaque of him inside the schools front doors ...

“Dawkins and Hitchens miss two important points. First, their critics are not  only talking about their scholarly limitations but about their errors, errors that a more informed or careful critic wouldn’t make…”. Curtis White, The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers (with new afterward; Brooklyn, London: Melville House, 2014), 35. Popular books are often based more on the author's audacity and force of personality than on carefulness or expertise. They are pep rallies in print, exercises in preaching to the choir to elicit enthusiastic shouts of "Amen," and let anyone outside the choir be damned. Popular authors are cheerleaders really, who use forceful assertions in place of pom poms. As such the most popular authors are likely to be dilettantes prone to making obvious mistakes of the sort that proper expertise would have saved them from making. Still I often find myself surprised that some of the ...

Very often I find that the cycles of history bring clarity when they come around again. In reading the description the politics of ressentiment in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals what he was describing seemed essentially illusive. I have to say, however, that the Trump years and especially now with the impeachment hearings, what Nietzsche was talking about has come into sharper focus for me. And this quite apart from questions of whether he's guilty of the things he's being charged with, whether he's a good or bad guy, etc. However you view all that (and remember I didn't vote for the guy), it does very much appear that his political opponents have sort of cast him in the typical role of the Übermensch whose unbounded freedom they feel intimidated by and therefore at any cost must gang up on in Nietzschean sense and take down. In a sense this is nothing new since the person opposed by political opponents is very seldom the person who actually ex...

The best place to start is by getting hold of a New Testament and reading right through.  Don’t start with books about the Bible or books about Jesus, or even with a Study Bible.  Just with a modern language New Testament.  There are several that are good. But you want one that has good cross references.  A cross reference takes you to other places in the Bible where they talk about the same thing. To many cross references to start just get confusing.  That’s why the best New Testament is one that mainly has cross references when the New Testament quotes from the Old Testament.  That way you can go back and look at the quotations in their original context as a way of understanding the larger historic and prophetic significance of what the New Testament is saying.  The NIV (New International Version) is very good for this. 

The New Testament was written by nine or ten different authors. But in this post let me start with the authors of the Gospels and save discussion of the rest for a second post. The word “Gospel” means “Good News.” And so, when we speak of the Gospels we are talking about the “Good News” about Jesus according to Matthew, to Mark, to Luke and to John. If you want to learn about Jesus, then, the Gospels are the best place to start. But who were Mathew, Mark, Luke and John? Let’s talk about that: MATTHEW the son of Alpheaus (also called Levi), was a tax collector in or near the town, which Jesus used as home base for a time. Matthew was one of the men Jesus chose be one of the twelve Apostles.   MARK, who wrote what is usually considered the earliest of the four gospels, was the son of a Christian woman named Mary who had a large household in Jerusalem where the Christians met in the earliest days of the Church. He was also the cousin of Barnabas, the Apostle Pau...

Getting in on the world's great universal moralistic aspiration : Oneness as its own end, Oneness without God. "It is for freedom that Christ sets It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery." Gal 5:1 I am more and more impressed as time goes on how Christ frees us not only from the sins of culture but also from its righteousnesses. At this point I am beginning to suspect that the righteousnesses of culture may well represent greater and more cruel forms of bondage, of servitude, of slavery than the sins of culture. When a person comes to Christ in faith and repudiates any reliance on his or her own righteousness, they must realize that one of the reasons this is essential is that the righteousness they are repudiating has been terminally compromised by the luxuriant moralistic fantasies that they have breathed in and embraced simply because of where and when they were raised. The...