Pub Theology 12/10/24 -- Deep thoughts, deeper thinking

Peter Trumbore • December 9, 2024

Those of us of a certain age surely remember the old Saturday Night Live bit, "Deep Thoughts" by comedian Jack Handey, a staple of the show back in the 1990s. Handey's collection of deep thoughts was first published in 1992, and little bits would be aired on SNL in between sketches, accompanied by bucolic imagery like that above, and soothing New Age music, It was a fun gag that produced gems like these:


  • The purpose of a lock is to turn a door into a wall.
  • When you buy and eat a half chicken, you are secretly sharing a meal with a stranger.
  • Your car keys have traveled farther than your car.
  • The object of golf is to play the least amount of golf.
  • With every new sunrise, there is a new chance. But with every sunset, you blew it.


These were clever, often silly, and sometimes actually thought-provoking. It's been suggested that we can train ourselves to become deeper thinkers by asking ourselves, and really trying to contemplate the answers to, what are essentially unanswerable questions. A classic example of one such question is the familiar Zen koan "What is the sound of one hand clapping." Zen monks were instructed to meditate on and debate such cryptic questions, a typically frustrating and maddening exercise, as a way to acquire, through mental struggle, a deeper understanding of the question itself. That was the path to enlightenment.


This discussion comes from a source we've been turning to lately for inspiration for our weekly conversations, a regular feature at The Atlantic website by Arthur C. Brooks, whose pieces revolve around building our lives. In this article, Brooks suggests that we can improve our emotional health and grow as a person by wrestling with our own questions without clear answers. Questions like, Why am I here? or For what would I give my life? And, he continues, the questions that tend to matter the most to us are typically the least likely to have clear answers. In fact, trivial questions are generally easy to answer with clarity. That's why we like them, and shy away from the hard ones.


Further, he argues, thinking about hard questions is good for us:


"Taking the evidence all together, I’d propose a hypothesis that, as a society, we have become spiritually flabby and psychically out of shape because we haven’t been getting in the reps on challenging existential questions. As much research has documented, anxiety and depression have been exploding in the United States, especially among young adults. I believe that this is not because we’re thinking too much about the hard questions of life, but too little. As I’ve discussed previously, we pass our hours and days hypnotized by the trivia injected into our lives via our tech devices, and are less willing to delve into deeper matters. The elevated levels of sadness and fear are, I believe, at least in part the result of our philosophically sedentary lifestyle. Like the benefits of hard exercise, the short-term discomfort of big questions is necessary to avoid the long-term ill-health that comes from avoiding these questions."


And so, if we're going to treat this like exercise, then here are Brooks' suggestions for to build our philosophical muscles.


First, schedule your mental workout. "Choose a period of time each day—say, 30 minutes—that you can dedicate to weighing tough questions of real importance. First, ban all devices and allow no distractions; then figure out in advance what existential or spiritual challenges you plan to consider. You can use a paragraph or two of philosophy or scripture to focus your mind on a specific question, break it down, and improve your understanding."


Alternatively, go for a long walk. "For some people, a good alternative is a long walk alone, without devices, as a way to give room to your right-brain questions. Philosophers have long advocated this technique—Immanuel Kant was reputedly such a regular walker, to aid his deep thinking, that neighbors set their watches by his passing. Research has shown that walking naturally stimulates creative thinking and facilitates the ability to focus without being distracted."


Then there's this; Invite boredom. "One effect of our screen-centered culture is that we’re never truly bored. This might sound great, like a quality-of-life enhancement. But it isn’t. Experiencing boredom is crucial for abstract reasoning and insight, because it helps stimulate the brain’s default-mode network, the set of brain regions that becomes active when the outside world does not impinge on our mind’s attention. Neuroscientists have shown that such activity is vital for accessing high-level meaning. For this reason, building periods of boredom into our life really matters, because they no longer occur spontaneously."


So what deep thoughts do you have about all of this? Do you take time to ponder the unanswerable questions that swirl around us, or do you prefer to tune them out in favor of the trivial and easily answered? Do you think you would benefit from developing a habit of encouraging deep thinking like that outlined by Brooks above? What kind of unanswerable questions would you focus on in such a practice?


Will be inviting boredom if we take all of this on in our conversation this week? Join us for the discussion tomorrow evening, Tuesday Dec. 10, starting at 7pm at Casa Real in downtown Oxford, and find out.



By Peter Trumbore April 1, 2025
It's not every year that our Pub Theo conversations fall on April Fools Day, but here we are. In fact, near as I can tell, the last time this happened was in 2019, you know, those glorious pre-pandemic days before everything started to fall apart and we all lost our senses of humor. It is sometimes suggested that worship is holy and serious stuff, and that church is no place for jokes. What's your take? How serious, or how lighthearted can we be or should we be? Is there a place for humor in church? Better yet, let's take our questions right to top. In short, does God have a sense of humor? What would you point to as evidence for your answer? And does that tell you anything broader about how you think about God and your relationship with the divine? There is a long debate about the role of humor in the Christian faith. Seriously, people argue over whether Jesus laughed or not. (For what it's worth, the Bible doesn't offer us any examples of Jesus laughing, let alone smiling, but that doesn't mean he didn't.) Over at the website Patheos, there's an interesting article about irreverence, faith, and what we want our relationship with God to be like. This line from the article resonates: "But we only get a cardboard cutout Jesus in scripture—to see him as a human being, I think some irreverent thoughts. Given that we human beings are flawed, imperfect, and funny to our toes but have perfectionist delusions, irreverence is a universal humanizer." So in our discussion this evening, we're going to talk about humor and the place of irreverence in our religious and non-religious lives. This conversation will be no joking matter! Join us this evening starting at 7pm at Casa Real in downtown Oxford.
By Andrew Guffey March 30, 2025
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our services are at 8:30 & 10:00 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream for the 10:00 a.m. service. 
By Peter Trumbore March 24, 2025
From an early age we're taught that honesty is the best policy. But is it? From a social and psychological perspective, the benefits of honesty seem pretty straightforward . Honesty builds trust. This can in turn lead to stronger relationships with family, friends, coworkers, and so on. Likewise, when we are honest with ourselves, we build trust in ourselves which can lead to better mental health and helping you lead a more authentic and more fulfilling life. But are there circumstances where holding back, or scaling back the honesty, as the XKCD comic above puts it, is the better way forward? In short, is it sometimes better to be less honest, both with others and with ourselves? For example, in a review of a new novel by Emily St. James, Atlantic writer Emma Sarappo reminds us that "Many LGBTQ people face a lifetime of moments that require them to weigh honesty against safety," a dilemma that is particularly acute and dangerous for trans people in this very moment. We're going to talk about all of this in our conversation this week. What is your relationship with honesty? Are there times in your life where you feel like you've been too honest? More importantly, what does it mean to you to be honest and to live honestly? And how do we do it? What gets in the way? Join us for the discussion tomorrow evening, Tuesday March 25. The conversation starts at 7pm at Casa Real in downtown Oxford.
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This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our services are at 8:30 & 10:00 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream for the 10:00 a.m. service. 
By Peter Trumbore March 17, 2025
We've been at the whole Pub Theology thing for nearly a dozen years now (we first gathered all the way back in the summer of 2013), and we've covered a lot of ground and a lot of topics in our conversations over that span of time. Sometimes those topics are worth revisiting. I got to thinking about that on Sunday listening to the Gospel reading (Luke 13:31-35) and hearing Jesus refer to Jerusalem as the city that kills its prophets. And it's true. Prophets get a rough treatment in scripture, what with being ignored, exiled, killed and so on. Even Nazareth, Jesus' hometown, was not particularly interested in hearing what he had to say. It turns out that this issue has been on our agenda before. Almost exactly six years ago, back in 2019, we had a discussion on the topic of prophets and their often rocky reception. But since we've got some new faces around the dinner table these days, it's worth revisiting this conversation. As noted earlier, Jesus himself, in the Gospel of Luke, says "no prophet is accepted in his hometown." And in his case, the good people of Nazareth tried to throw him off a cliff. Likewise in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus says, "Only in his home town and in his own house is a prophet without honor." And, as already mentioned, in Luke, Jesus describes Jerusalem as the "city that kills the prophets." What's behind this scorn for prophets anyway? Perhaps it's this: One piece I recently read described the essence of being a prophet as engaging in "denial-free thinking." Or perhaps, as we brought up some weeks ago, maybe it's because they insist on speaking hard truths that people might not want to hear. Maybe those insights have something to do with it. So for our discussion this week we're going to talk about prophets. What do you think it means to be a prophet in our modern age? Do we even encounter them anymore? What's our reaction? We're familiar with prophets in the religious sense, but what about secular prophets? Do they get the same kind of unwelcome response? Can you think of any in our present day? I'm pretty sure I can. Join us for the conversation tomorrow evening, Tuesday March 18, beginning at 7 pm at Casa Real in downtown Oxford. To get you thinking, here's a link to a long book excerpt which raises some interesting notions about the rejection or acceptance of prophets. I won't vouch for all of the arguments, but it's worth a read if you have the chance.
By Andrew Guffey March 16, 2025
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our services are at 8:30 & 10:00 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream for the 10:00 a.m. service. 
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This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our services are at 8:30 & 10:00 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream for the 10:00 a.m. service. 
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This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our services are at 8:30 & 10:00 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream for the 10:00 a.m. service. 
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