It’s curious how many things that we find thrilling or enjoyable are also quite risky. We can enjoy risky activities for one of two reasons:
1) Because of the risk; or,
2) In spite of the risk, that is, because we enjoy an activity that just happens to be risky--the fact it is also risky gives us no additional pleasure or even detracts from the pleasure.
Option (2) is unobjectionable. We experience this kind of pleasure all the time. Eating cake may carry some long-term health risk, but it is unlikely that the pleasure from doing so is enhanced by that knowledge. Therefore the more interesting option is (1). If we do in fact find pleasure in risk, we must further ask:
3) Is risk-taking pleasurable in itself?
4) Or, is it the case that risk-taking is not itself pleasurable but there are other goods that we do seek but are available to us only when risk-taking is involved.
The answer to (3) cannot be yes because we can think of too many risky activities that would bring us little pleasure at all (i.e. injecting oneself with the flu virus). Therefore insofar (1) is true—that we seek out some activities because they are risky—it must be because what we are seeking is not risk itself but something else that is most available to us during risky activities. What, then, do we seek that is most available to us during risk-taking? Honor or pride of overcoming fear or even concern for one’s own being is an obvious possibility. The seeking of honor at the expense of one’s bodily good is described by Hegel and Tocqueville as a noble or aristocratic impulse (as opposed to slavish concern for one’s own being even at the expense of one’s dignity). One can certainly be seeking to prove to oneself one’s own courage, as well as seeking the adulation of others who witness one’s courage. Another possibility is that what one seeks is diversion from one’s drub existence, the thrill of courting death which takes oneself out of one’s present situation, at least for a moment.
Perhaps more interesting yet is the kind of pleasure we receive from the appearance or feeling of something being risky when, in fact, we know we are perfectly safe—for example, watching a scary movie or riding a rollercoaster. Why do we invite fear when, in fact, we know we are safe? The answer to me is far from obvious and seems to invite the possibility that the human personality is bizarrely fractured, requiring a constant internal dialogue between what is real and fiction, and that finally we don’t know. If we really know the characters on the screen are following a script, would we in fact be scared? It’s doubtful. I doubt any of the stagehands who helped make the movie were ever frightened in its filming. Likewise, my guess is that riding a rollercoaster simply feels scary, regardless of our knowledge of its safety or not. What this seems to suggest is that we experience life at the gut level as well as the more-conscious cognitive level, and at least some of our thrills at risk behavior comes from a strong disjunction between the two.
We've all noticed old and untraveled roads covered with vegetation. It's remarkable to me how quickly nature can swallow up or erase the works of man. All right, so here's a scenario and a question: Every person on the planet disappears or drops dead immediately. How many years would it take before all traces of man's endeavors--from the garden we planted to the Great Wall of China to the Empire State building--would disappear from sight? Thousands? Millions? Billions?
Here’s a photo of a pepper within a pepper. If that pepper contains a pepper within it as well, how many peppers are in that thing?! (Botanists, please note that this is a rhetorical question.) 
The Greeks thought that the question of "the one and the many" was, at the end of the day, the most interesting (and perhaps only) philosophical question.
Here is something of a confession: What I found most troubling (by far) about the events of 9/11 was not the loss of life but the collapse of the Twin Trade Towers. That those pillars of steel and concrete could simply disappear within seconds unsettled me terribly. Karl Marx said of society under capitalism that "all things solid melt into thin air." But long before Marx, the book of Ecclesiastes tells us that all things that come from our hands are but "labored for the winds" and that there will be no "remembrance of things that are to come by those who will come after." Some day in the distance, even the stars and sun will shine no more. To think that the magnificent stone buildings in this photo will suffer the same fate as the diaphanous mushrooms in the foreground is indeed a reminder that if we do seek immortality, we best not seek it through our own labours.
Hell is not mentioned at all in the Old Testament. As I understand Genesis 3, the punishments for our original transgression, some stated, some implied, are these: (1) Shame; (2) Death (along with disease and pain); (3) pain in childbirth; (4) Inequity between the sexes in marriage; (5) Toil instead of rewarding work; (6) and a fallen nature that produces "thorns and thistles". I confess that these punishments strike me as terribly thorough and sufficient. (I smile when I recall that my Reformed tradition informs us that we ought to be grateful for the mercy God demonstrated on that same day.) So why the need for Hell, that is, everlasting pain and anguish on top of these originally-stated punishments? Virtually no person in the New Testament writes or speaks of Hell at any length save one: Jesus. That our Lord speaks so frequently of Hell is reason enough for me to believe in it, but everything else in Scripture prompts me to believe that we can trust that Hell's role is for justice and not cruelty, and the language Jesus employed to describe Hell was designed for us to take it seriously, not because it is a literal description of the "place."
Ancient Greek philosophers believed that the world has value even without a personal God intervening in human affairs. Christians believe that life and the world more generally receives its value from behind, lit, as it were, by a great sun. The Greeks believed, by comparison, that the world is self-illuminating. This is one reason Christians see atheism in such stark, almost hysterical terms: They find it hard to believe that life has any meaning at all without the Divine backlighting. In this sense, Nietzsche, Sartre, and other existentialists are in spirit more Christian than Greek; they buy into the Christian premise that life without a God is nihilistic. The Greeks seemed to have believed that seventy years of life is worth, at least, something. C.S. Lewis would agree with the Greeks but point to our yearnings for eternity to show how, finally, the Greek perspective cannot ultimately satisfy us.
The monsters of other cultures--say, African or Asian monsters--always strike me as at least as comical as they are terrifying. One possibility is we have to be trained into fear, and I have not received the proper training to appreciate the horrors of Asian and African monsters. Another possibility is that what we fear, deep down, is the liminal, that is, that which has one foot in our world—the world in which we live and delude ourselves that we have mastered--and one foot in another world, a world altogether unknown and alien. That which is perfectly alien from our own experience is, well, neutral toward us. It is that which shares something with us that frightens us most: mutants; deformities; a corpse; vampires; speaking beasts, etc. Since African or Asian monsters emerge from a culture whose symbols do not gain traction with us, naturally their monsters seem simply "other" and therefore lack the immediacy necessary for terror.
How much of what we find beautiful had its origin in simple functionality?
Probably quite a bit.
One of the chief differences between European movies and American movies is that European movies end realistically--which is to say, sadly. What could be more real than the notion that all of us are born but for the grave? When I shared this "insight" with my students, their reaction was laughter. I could not decide whether their laughter was pure nervousness at the inevitability of their own mortality, or whether it was the laughter of wisdom--a reflection that the grave, in fact, does not define us. It may well be that America's ride-off-into-the-sunset mentality may--just may--reflect our deepest reality more accurately than the Europeans' pessimism.
We enjoy anthropormorphizing everything from candlesticks to mice (my children make their utensils speak with one another),while we like to pretend to be anything but ourselves (i.e, robots, bears, soldiers, etc). Why do we hate to be who we are unless that hatred reflects something absolutely central to who, in fact, we really are? This is a picture of my oldest daughter.
For we know that if our earthly house, a tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 Corinthians 5:1
Here the mood of the picture is terribly ambivalent; it was intended to be a whimsical contrast, but when I converted it to black and white the hint of loss came out more starkly.
I like the composition and colors of this shot.
I saw this frozen image of an angel formed from the overspill of a fountain near my church. Before I became a Christian, I saw the evidence of God nowhere; everything confirmed His stupefying absence. Immediately after I became a Christian, evidence of God and His design were before my eyes from morn to night. I was once blind but now I could see. I confess that today I am struck simultaneously both by God's presence as well as the intriguingly impressive distance one can go in explaining this world without bringing god into the equation. Isn't it curious that God created a world so open to incredibly diverse and seemingly equally plausible interpretations? If you object in the phrase "equally plausible," then ask yourself why, in fact, well-intended and reasonable minds that seek truth do not approach unanimity on the nature of the world. Try as one may, God's existence is beyond proof. Or disproof. I find that quite revealing about God's sense of humor.
But I suppose one can find bears everywhere as well if one looks hard enough.
For who knows what is good for man in life, all the days of his vain life which he passes like a shadow? Ecclesiastes 6:12
I once engaged in a spirited debate with a woman at the Chicago Art Institute about whether one of the pieces exhibited,a canvas covered chiefly in black paint with thickly-textured paint strokes, should count as art. She argued that it was not art; I argued that it certainly could be. Her position amounted to this: Art should be about--that is, represent--something, and this painting was about nothing. My argument was that all representative art is itself abstract; no one really believes the painting of the tree is in fact a real tree--the kind you can climb up and pick an apple from its branches. What distinguishes modern "abstract" art from "traditional" art is, ironically, its departure from the past's dependence on abstracting a scene from reality. Modern art is simply what it is: an aesthetic experience. In this sense it is like a symphony-- without representational meaning but still, for some, a profoundly powerful experience.
I would love to do a study of water in the Bible: the waters of baptismal forgiveness; the killing waters of the Flood; the chaotic waters at creation; the water turned into wine; and on and on. Water, symbol of life and death in equal measure.
I somehow have my doubts in the efficacy of this office in revitalizing my lovely city's downtown. Just out of the picture's frame, there were two or three more papers on the ground.
The marquee struck my funny bone. I suppose God is Lord of all creation, and that includes one-hour photoshops. Here's a question: is the sign principally secular, spiritual, or neither?
It's simply extraordinary how quickly nature reclaims as her own any space we leave unattended. An unused road will be overgrown within just a few years. Were the world to be instantly rid of every human being, how long would it take for every trace of human life to be erased to a cursory inspection? NYC may be our best hope for immortal extraterrestrial fame. I suppose God told us to subdue the world before we were swallowed up by it.
Western music is based on a 12-note scale, with emphasis on harmony or chords to make the music sound pleasing and full. Eastern music, best as I can recall, has many more but smaller intervals in its scale, and the intervals between notes are not as "evenly spaced" as they are in the Western scale. It also relies far less on chords; its richness comes from the fullness of the scale itself. I love a good deal of Eastern music, especially Indian music (I'm wild for Tabla), but it always sounds "foreign." I wonder: Were I to listen to nothing but Indian music for the next decade, would Western music have the same, foreign sound as Indian music does presently for me.
Here the light does not add to warmth, as one might think it should, but instead brings out the starkness and coldness of the cabin. I've looked closely for a ghost in this picture; it just seems to beg for one, doesn't it!
I like how the colors of the ladybugs and brick and paint complement so nicely.
No picture captures reality. Put differently, every picture captures only a sliver of reality. So why do I feel guilty about enhancing or "punching up" a picture? Is it an insult to God, as if I'm saying His creation is inadequate and I can improve it? Is it because the real talent of a photographer is in the hunt, in finding the beauty as well as capturing it? Is it because we have a "journalistic" view of photography and do not recognize the overwhelming extent to which every picture is, finally, fabricated or a lie?
The dew drops make all the difference.
Is black and white inherently more creepy? This picture was just silly in color. Why?
Here the plastic butterfly is more "eternal" than the organic flower, but who would say it is more real?
Are the shadow and vase equally real? Scripture says that we should fix our eyes on that which is invisible rather than that which is visible, for that which is visible is fleeting, while that which invisible is eternal. Does Being by its essence entail a trade-off between the eternal and real and invisible, on the one hand, and the palpable yet unreal? Odd, isn't it, that both the Platonic tradition and Christianity seeks being in that which, by every outward appearance, has no being whatsoever. Assuming that Heaven is both real and visible and palpable, why is that which is most real here on earth is the least tangible?
The photos one takes cannot help but reflect one's own sensibilities, at least indirectly. I love to find visual patterns in chaos as well as to show how what we believe to be familiar becomes invisible over time. I attempt to recover an object's visibility by showing it from a new angle, by confusing the viewer. In general, I love to show the seriousness of humor and the absurd in the serious. In this picture I attempted to point the viewer toward the mystery of the divine, drawing upon obvious spiritual metaphors of fire and light. I did not succeed as I had hoped, as I virtually never do in my photographs. They inevitably just become what they are, altogether independent of my original intentions yet somehow still reflecting my personality.
C.S. Lewis argues that objects command a kind of natural respect appropriate to their nature. In other words, horses really are more noble than, say, badgers. And yet daily life seems to suggest that what we call beautiful is almost perfectly subjective, a function not of the objects under consideration but of the preferences of the viewer. Is this spider contemptible or genuinely a marvel? I suppose it depends, at least in part, whether it is on the outside of my windowpane or on the rim of my bowl of soup.
Virtually no one who has seen this picture likes it; it's one of my favorites that I've taken.
The rainbow: theologically significant; scientifically important topic in the of field of optics.
I was in Atlanta to visit a friend who was in the hospital (dying, tragically, from a car accident). I saw this Hummer with that license plate ("ILUVGOD") and was instantly captured by an irony that I still feel more far more than I can can actually express.
I took this with a timer; it's my scary arm. 
A close-up of some farm equipment I took.
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