Marginal Christianity

          One thing our post-factual age has made clear is that we do not live by the “facts” at all. No, we live rather by the stories that have and continue to shape our lives. We may not be aware of them. They seem to us to be just the way things are. The “facts” as we see them fit the contours these stories have already etched into our hearts, minds, and bodies. And it remains so until enough challenges to the truth and reality of those stories accumulate. Thomas Kuhn taught us that science progresses by following the accepted findings of the science of the time until enough “anomalies,” that is, experimental results that don’t accord with the accepted scientific findings, accumulate that make it impossible to accept the science of the times with intellectual honesty. And the paradigm of science changes taking on a new shape that becomes the reigning description of science until the next paradigm shift.     ...

by S.D. Kelly February 5, 2015   I t is a truth universally acknowledged that winter in New England, where I live, can be cold and long and dark. This is why, for the last four Januaries, I have looked forward to the return of  Downton Abbey with the same level of anticipation that I imagine my ancestors brought to the lighting of an oil lamp on winter evenings: a bright spot of warmth and light to ward off the cold, dark night. The misery outside my window is mitigated by the televised images of attractive people in custom-made Edwardian clothes milling about a beautiful—and massive—English country house in Yorkshire. From inside my climate-controlled 21st century house, I peer at the relics of a way of life, now a century past, that have retreated from memory into fantasy.   I’m not alone in my love of costume dramas, generally, and in my fascination with  Downton Abbey,  specifically. The show has b...