John Robert Harris

We Even Saw Figures Tending Fires John Robert Harris

Collected from almost fifteen years of publications appearing in the online journal Praesidium, these twenty-seven essays are divided into two sections. "Christian Faith and the Philosophical Tradition", containing ten rather longer pieces, addresses broad questions that challenge religious faith (especially, but not exclusively, Christianity). How is the eternal life of the spirit to be imagined in a space beyond time? Is our strictly linear understanding of time here on earth a helpful model for representing the spiritual journey? Is social progress an adequate-or even appropriate-objective for those who seek spiritual fulfillment? May not science and political progressivism, indeed, be rival "faiths" to a metaphysical belief system when their bedrock assumptions are taken into consideration?The second section, "Faith-Grounded Ethics and Contemporary Controversies", with almost twice as many shorter essays, doesn't so much desert these issues as it revisits them against the backdrop of "hot button" topics on the twenty-first century scene. Freedom of speech is paid particular attention, as is the dubious role of organized religion in lubricating the ascent of centralized authority over our personal lives. Merely questioning the spiritual credentials of progressive movements like the promotion of gay marriage can easily bring a ban upon a book in many parts of the West today; but Dr. Harris explicitly couches his discussion in terms that Socrates and Epictetus (not to mention Confucius, if not the Buddha) would have found entirely unobjectionable-in terms, that is, of governing carnal impulse so as to yoke it to the designs of the rational will. That such fundamental moral teaching risks being classed as "hate speech" nowadays justifies one in wondering if the postmodern endgame may be nothing less than a secular take-over of our lives by insatiably power-hungry utopians... and this possibility, too, is scrutinized in fine detail. Clearly, Dr. Harris has not prepared an anthology intended only for a certain denominational audience. As he stresses in the Author's Preface, "All of my writings are dedicated to all human beings everywhere. I do not require that the reader accept the Bible as literally true in every clause"-this although he himself is a devoted Christian. Not that his objective is a vapid ecumenical embrace of all perspectives as equally valid; a profound discontent with how the mandarin intellectuals in control of mainstream communions water down the message of faith is indeed one of the book's most recurrent motifs. In contrast, the rigor sought by Harris is one which any thoughtful, fair-minded person might potentially acknowledge. These essays, in other words, persistently push back against worldly agendas in their search for something like C. S. Lewis's "mere Christianity": an emphasis, that is, of the essentially human longings, frustrations, and moments of awe that make the quest for a destination beyond this world irresistible.