Category: Constructing Truth

Some look at all this, and see the death of anything that might be called universal. Everything is particular, everything is from a perspective, everything is relative. (This is what those who warned me were afraid of. If you look at all that’s out there, …

But Modernism is on its last legs, and we can trace many of the death blows. Throughout the 20th century, here are a few that emerged: Science discovers that the reality described by Newton’s law of gravity and Cartesian dualism can’t account for the new …

Modernism imagines the best place to be is in that “universal”, in that unbiased place of foundational truth. Cultural perspectives and biases must be removed and ignored. Justice must be “blind” to the particulars, in order to find the universal and build up from there. …

In 1992, I took a class from the brilliant Dr. Nancey Murphy. She is a doctor two times over, with an earned Ph.D. in Philosophy and an earned Th.D. (Doctor of Theology). About 500 years ago, history watched a seismic shift from the Medieval world …

How do we construct coherent views of reality in a world of biased perspectives? How do we “make” truth that can help us live and act according to our values? I’m 52 years old, and that puts me at sort of a pivot point for …

I had a sort of “a-ha” slowly emerge over the last few months, a realization that has prompted me to wrestle and share this long piece.  The very people who are now saying truth is difficult to know, the very people yelling about “fake news”, …

It’s true—media is biased.  But so are you. And so am I. We each come from our own perspective, culture, and history, which gives each of us a bias. The problem comes, though, when we can’t see the bias in the air we breathe; when …

Knowing what’s really true isn’t as self-evidently obvious as we once thought. (Spoiler alert: it never actually was). But pursuing truth (or coherence, or values, or whatever language you want to use to describe it)—pursuing truth is necessary hard work. This is something desperately important …

“Who knows what’s really true anymore?”“Fake news!”“Stats can be manipulated to say anything.”“Mainstream media is biased, do your research and don’t be in a bubble.” Whether the subject is politics or COVID or who knows what else in our polarized world, social media has been …