Introduction

My name is David Miller, and I work at Union College in Barbourville, KY, where I am the College Minister and Instructor of Integrated Humanities. I am an ordained clergyperson in the Kentucky Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church (an Elder, for those who know the distinctions within Methodist clergy). I am also a student in the University of Louisville's Humanities Ph.D. program, with an interdisciplinary area of concentration in Studies in Culture and specializations in Continental Philosophy of Religion, Phenomenology of Religion, Hermeneutical Phenomenology, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Marion.

This blog is an attempt to update a personal website I had back in the min-nineties. (If you're into time travel, you can check out that old website, which includes a handful of sermons, at Internet Archive's Way Back Machine.) This blog, like that old website, will link to sites I found to be meaningful. I will try to provide commentary that is life-affirming, truly salvific. The things that provide this for me are my spirituality, the love of family and friends, intellectual stimulation, and play. I am not interested in politics, per se, but, because of my religious convictions regarding social justice, I will include political material.

For most of my adult life, I have been nourished and nurtured by inclusive Protestantism. I honor these roots even as they impel me beyond the bounds of their traditions. I seek goodness, truth, and beauty in the world’s wisdom as expressed in religion, literature, history, music, art, philosophy, and science. I see these expressions of wisdom as gifts of the divine that liberate people from whatever binds them and that help people grow into their best selves. Wherever it is found, I will seek to study this wisdom appreciatively, critically, and with a post-critical naivete; I will seek to teach it in ways that are appropriate to the development of those around me; and I will seek to practice it in ways that are integral to who I am now and to who I hope to become.