Story-Truth and Happening-Truth

One of the fun things about writing Riparian Church is that people who tend to read it are interested in keeping the “story-ness” of their lives while still trying to handle the “fact-ness” of life. 

That is, they want the structure and meaning that a life of faith in God (variously defined) gives, and the moral, ethical, psychological, and emotional benefits thereof; but they want to also be true to the-world-as-it-is and be as free as possible from the charge of having An Imaginary Friend.

I think therefore that many readers might be interested in the collision of discourses represented in Dan Kois’ review in Slate of John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s Lifespan of a Fact, a book that (Kois makes me think) I’d rather think about than read.  

It’s a book that doesn’t look like it would look well in the Kindle.  It reminds me a bit of Jacques Derrida’s Circumfession, in which the philosopher wrote his own memoir wreathed around by philosophical notes by a student collaborator.  It’s semi-fiction as dialogue, and, like so many dialogues today, it bears marks of self-hatred as well as hatred of the interlocutor.

Ah, well.  Maybe I can get it from the library: it’s more than I care to pay for.  But when story crashes into fact, I’m tensely and intensely interested.

Lee Strobel Fouls Out

I took an hour or two today to watch Lee Strobel’s “The Case For Faith.”

The Amazon reviews are typically full-throated exultations of the video’s power. 

I found it weirdly lacking in substance.

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Truth and Language

A poetic statement is designed to offer an invitation into, not a statement about, the writer's internal state.

And in that sense it's more like a religion or myth than it is like an "opinion."

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Truthiness and Factiness and How We Speak

Some truths cannot be expressed in factual language without loss.

For example, if somebody tells you "My love is a red, red rose," he is speaking of an unverifiable emotional experience and inviting you to share it through the power of evocative imagery, and of course faith.

When we use simile, we do the same thing: "Reading your blog is like sliding naked down a razor blade into a pool of lemon juice," a comment that shows up in my mailbag with startling regularity.

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Truth & Experience: With A Name Like "McGurk," It's Got To Be Good

It's worth noting the enormous degree to which the mind makes the world, I think.   If one test-subject hears the word "Bah" in the McGurk test even when he sees a distinct dental action, he is running against the consensus of perceivers: but if all but one test-subject perceive the syllable as "Fah," who is "insane," or "delusional," or "hallucinating"?

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Knowing Things Are True: A Community Sport

So. "Truth" is the thing to which our statements about and perceptions of the world either do correspond or do not. They are rarely perfect, these statements of ours. But I would argue that what's really interesting is what happens before we talk about truth when we are restlessly looking for the thing(s) in which we shall put our faith. If we are narrow ("senses, reason"), we will see only those things in the universe (and in ourselves) that are opaque to the senses and reason: if we are a little broader, we'll be thinking about things like love,  and how what we really do know fits together and situates us in relation to other things.  No sense can teach you that.

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Untangling Cliche: "In Spirit & In Truth": The Samaritan Woman's Dialogue

I suppose it’s possible from all this to derive some sort of general statement about North Point Church and its practices, but I think that’s forcing scripture to grab its ankles.

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Fact & Truth

From The Mailbag:

What is the difference between "fact" and "truth"?

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Truth of Scripture, Factual and Figurative Language

Following up this post, and deeply conscious that I'm violating a rule that good blog-writing should be short and to the point:

From the Mailbag:

I just want to know how a person who believes that the events in the Bible are as fictional as Aesop's Fables can also believes that the Bible is divinely inspired, set apart from other books.

I would put the question the other way around:

Why would you say that it wouldn't be inspired just because it's fictional?

If we encounter in Aesop's fables a moral that we say is "true" (and we do, all the time), we don't say, "But of course it's less true than scripture" unless we're very confused about what truth is. Either it's true, or it's not, or it's true with qualifications, but it's not "less" true than truth.

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