First- and Second-Order Pain

DALL-E made this with some help.

Like most people, I experience pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, mental pain, perhaps even spiritual pain. It happens to the best of us.

It would be nice if something as widespread and commonplace as pain were pleasant and enriching. But as it turns out, I don’t actually like pain that much. You might even say I hate it. I would very much like to experience less of it. I would like so much to experience less pain that I’ve thought quite a bit about how to do so.

Recently while pursuing these researches I discovered something—a method not (alas!) of completely eliminating pain, but of greatly diminishing it. This solution, or mitigation, works against all the kinds of pain I know of: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Nor is it an obvious solution. I don’t think I’ve come across anyone else talking about it, at least not quite in this way. So I’d better share it with you in case you are also one of those who dislike pain and would like to rid yourself of some of it.

Continue reading “First- and Second-Order Pain”

When God Provides No Miracle

Believers and unbelievers alike ought to recall from Scripture how often it is true that the Lord works through nature rather than against it. (CS Lewis makes this point in his book Miracles.) Without wishing to be flippant, it’s almost as if the Lord surfs nature rather than slicing it or else making no contact with it.

Lewis points out that even in the feedings of the five- and four-thousand—in some ways the greatest miracles in history—the miracle was not to countermand nature so much as to accelerate it. Jesus didn’t pluck fish from the air; he received ordinary fish, passed hand-to-hand, that had been caught with a line and hook and bait from a mucky lake, and simply increased its mass. Somebody made—skillfully or not, burning or undercooking or baking just right—the loaves he multiplied. Jesus did not wave his arms in a magical gesture that caused purple light to shoot across the crowd, into their gaping mouths, filling their stomachs with magical sustenance. He took what was already present in nature and expanded it more rapidly than it otherwise might have. People chewed the miraculous fish with ordinary, sometimes broken, sometimes aching teeth. Those caught fish, had they been allowed to keep on swimming, might have multiplied into thousands of fish, sufficient to feed the crowd, in a few more generations; but that would have taken years. The wheat for the bread and the women’s labor to grind, mix, knead, and bake it could have fed the crowd in a few more years of harvests and long baking days. Jesus did in seconds what the natural process might have done more slowly. He didn’t contradict nature, he amplified it.

Continue reading “When God Provides No Miracle”

Lyra

One day a young angel, only three and a half billion years old, very naive, with limited experience of the wide universe and eager for more, was called over by one of her elder brothers. “I have a special mission for you,” he said. “It is said that Life has appeared somewhere in the universe, in accordance with the purpose and timing of the Almighty. It is your task to seek out this Life, and when you find it, tell us so that we may visit the planet to nurture and guide it.”

Continue reading “Lyra”

Measures

Here’s how it happened for me. I was sitting in the back seat on the passenger side. I had just asked the driver how long he’d been with Uber, and he said, like he’d answered the question a thousand times, “Six months.” Then I asked how many rides he’d given, and there was a sort of cool pride in his face and I was expecting a big number, when I saw—or really felt—a presence to my right, a buzzing, looming mass. I looked out the window, and there was the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler right beside my door, coming closer. I still don’t know whether it was changing into our lane or we had drifted into its.

Continue reading “Measures”

Can a Christian Play Video Games?

I have been making video games for about 25 years. I’ve been a gamer since long before that, and a Christian since before that.

Games have changed a lot over the years. Prior to about 2005, there were a very limited number of good games, certainly a very limited number of “big” games that would take hours and hours of play. They tended to cost a lot of money: you didn’t get a lot of good gameplay for free. To be a gamer then meant to binge on a game for 20 or 40 hours, then wait several months for the next big game to come out. Therefore to be a “gamer” meant spending a lot of time not playing games. You’d get addicted to a game for a week or maybe a month, but then your sources would dry up and you’d go back to real life.

Continue reading “Can a Christian Play Video Games?”

The Quality of an Hour

This article is about board games, how they are designed and played, but most importantly how they are talked about. My goal in writing it is to help people who give reviews of board games to give better ones. My thesis will be that games produce certain subjective qualities of experience, and that a good board game review should analyze and expose these subjective qualities in an objective way.

Continue reading “The Quality of an Hour”

Reflections on Completing a Chronological Reading of C S Lewis’s Works

I recently completed the quest of reading everything C. S. Lewis ever wrote in chronological order. Now when the moment is fresh, I’d like to clarify, celebrate, and reflect upon that quest. My chief goal in reflection is to make as much good out of the reading as I can as well as to pave the way for the second expedition through his works that I hope to make someday.

Continue reading “Reflections on Completing a Chronological Reading of C S Lewis’s Works”

C. S. Lewis’s Letter to Tolkien upon First Reading The Lord of the Rings

J R. R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings over a long interval that began well before World War II and ended a few years after. Both Tolkien and his adult son Christopher regularly attended meetings of the Inklings, a literary group of which C. S. Lewis was the guiding star, and the two Tolkiens took turns reading The Lord of the Rings as it came together. Lewis had therefore heard most of The Lord of the Rings before receiving the typescript of the finished novel in October 1949. After reading it he wrote this letter to Tolkien.

Continue reading “C. S. Lewis’s Letter to Tolkien upon First Reading The Lord of the Rings”