Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, Why do we find it so difficult to speak a meaningful word in face of something like the mass shooting in Las Vegas? Trump called the massacre "pure evil"--as compared to what less-pure ones?  Mistakenly opened your neighbor's mail and dumped the evidence in the garbage? The adjective "pure" is meaningless, because the words "evil" and "goodness" are both undefined.  We can't give a definitive meaning to either because we cannot face up to goodness and thus cannot face down evil. Facing up to goodness means we'll need to acknowledge how "purely evil" we all are; facing down evil means to recognize there's still a last semblance of goodness in us, however feeble in its evil-mitigating power, however impossible it often feels to make tangible again a long-lost memory of our first commitment. We were commissioned to be moral creatures.  A commitment was made in our inception--on our behalf?--just for ...

Dear Eugene, Do you like the word "conversion," as in one holding up one's hand, "saying Yes to Jesus" when the music and moment feels right, as if the human heart changes like a flick of a switch, salvation a matter of having faith in one's faith? My question is too laden for it to be anything but rhetorical, I know.  And I am not trying to be cynical, even less to trivialize any Yes that is given to Jesus; we all rejoice with the angels with our own Yeses resounding in heaven when we see a life, any life, turning from darkness to light, from dying to living. But I suppose it is precisely because of how much we care about others, that we want to take a closer, honest look at the nature of how the Yeses are being called out. I know you love Anne Tyler's novels; so I assume you must have read Dorothy Allison's " Bastard out of Carolina "?  What an amazing novel, isn't it? When the protagonist of the story Ruth Anne tried t...

Dear Eugene, We talk about the doctrine  Sola gratia , Grace Alone, that we could comprehend God's saving act only and entirely as a favor unmerited, a mercy undeserved, a gift given out by the Holy Spirit according alone to Jesus Christ's redemptive sacrifice. But isn't it also true, as I looked around even within just the small confine of my study room, about everything else in God's creation?  What have we done to deserve our next breath? The other day I was walking through a big mall--I like to park far away from the library to make every outing a pilgrimage (and give myself an excuse to excurse to the bookstore)--and I saw couples walking hand-in-hand, some lovingly, some habitually, some reluctantly.  Many held together with only a weak magnetic pull, not enough for touching each others, good enough for acknowledging there is an other . And I thought, How many of us swaggering man could swagger no more if not for the women who are there for us in spite of...

Dear Eugene, Sometimes I wish my family is very poor.  Or we are in the middle of a war.  A famine.  Slavery.  Whatever.  Just something really really bad.  Bad enough that we would beg for deliverance, cry for salvation, that we could have a true exodus experience. And I know the thought is despicably crass, because much of the world is really in such really really bad shape.   If you so want it, why don't you just go there, there, or there?  I would look at the news and say to myself.   Don't you wear your first-world guilt on sleeve like it's a virtue. But I have nowhere to go but here.  Maybe one day God will call me to somewhere else, but as of this moment, God puts me here, gives me and my family much more than we need, and we must learn how to obey Him and do His will within the very particulars of our  here and now .  Affluence makes faithlessness all the more inexcusable.  Our cross to bear. As expec...