Nerd Faith  🔗 **Source:** [Nerd Faith]() ## Highlights - Are we sometimes afraid to let the divine be unsettling? ([Location 155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FJQKR9H9&location=155)) - Tags: aqua - “Why does what we believe matter for how we engage with the world?” ([Location 157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FJQKR9H9&location=157)) - Tags: aqua - How do we love in radical ways that break down systems of oppression? ([Location 160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FJQKR9H9&location=160)) - baptism service that asks God to grant the newly baptized “an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.”2 Faith is about looking upward to see the wonders that ([Location 184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FJQKR9H9&location=184)) - We want the universe to fit into our expectations because that means it must play by our rules! The fact is that so much in the universe—and certainly in the nature of God—truly is inconceivable. We cannot control God with the right set of prayers, rituals, or beliefs. ([Location 210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FJQKR9H9&location=210)) - Tags: aqua - Loving God is a lot more abstract, precisely because God is so wholly other and, therefore, unknowable. Maybe leaning into that unknowability of God is what it means to love God as well as our neighbors. ([Location 223](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FJQKR9H9&location=223)) - Tags: aqua - we might think of religion as dwelling within the inexhaustible wonder of God’s being, the depths of which we can never fully comprehend, even as we continue exploring. The posture of wonder allows us to view the structure of religion with humility rather than arrogance. The more knowledge we acquire of our faith and religious traditions, the more we see how incomprehensible God actually is. That is the immeasurable beauty of the divine. ([Location 260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FJQKR9H9&location=260)) - Tags: aqua - Rather than following a strict set of rules for their own sake, being chaotic good is about following sets of values like generosity, love, and compassion. ([Location 268](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FJQKR9H9&location=268)) - When confronted with an entity that is wholly other, we should be exceptionally wary of ever feeling like we have fully comprehended it. ([Location 289](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FJQKR9H9&location=289)) - Tags: aqua - There is a danger, however, in the absolutes of certainty, especially when grounded in a sense of our own rightness and righteousness. Morality cannot be reduced to a list of clear rules of right and wrong outside the complex reality of lived experience. ([Location 343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FJQKR9H9&location=343)) - Tags: aqua - fundamentalist atheists and fundamentalist Christians have more in common than either group wants to admit. ([Location 356](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FJQKR9H9&location=356)) - Tags: aqua - “Archeology is the search for fact, not truth. If it’s truth you’re interested in, philosophy class is right down the hall.” ([Location 366](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FJQKR9H9&location=366)) - Tags: aqua - it is important for us to remember that we do have different ways of knowing. Some knowledge comes to us intellectually. Some knowledge comes to us through embodied experience. Faith is far more than the intellectual assent to a series of beliefs about the divine. ([Location 427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FJQKR9H9&location=427)) - Tags: aqua - Wonder and whimsy are long-standing features of the human relationship to the world. ([Location 491](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FJQKR9H9&location=491)) - Tags: aqua ## New Highlights added 2026-07-30 at 3:41 PM - Reducing the world—and our place in it—to its utility leaves us with an impoverished view of creation. When we celebrate the world and one another as sources of wonder, we become so much more than mere things. ([Location 532](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FJQKR9H9&location=532))