Benjamin J. McFarland

I’d like to propose a thought experiment -- one that may transform your understanding of something you see every day. Thought experiments can change the world, or at least your understanding of it. Einstein’s great scientific breakthroughs started with a thought experiment, something like this one. For our experiment, imagine how a mirror works. If…

In the first part of this essay, I described how the twenty-first-century discovery of the oldest paintings on earth in Indonesia – including the Sulawesi warty pig – illustrates the main points of Darrel R. Falk’s On the (Divine) Origin of Our Species.Darrel R. Falk. On the (Divine) Origin of Our Species. (Wipf and Stock Publishers,…

Cave paintings and rusty ochre brushstrokes appear on the cover of Darrel R. Falk’s recently  published book, On the (Divine) Origin of Our Species.Darrel R. Falk. On the (Divine) Origin of Our Species. (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2023). These earliest examples of art call out to us today. Falk describes the European cave paintings in the…

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy…

I want to tell stories that reveal deep truths. I never want to “tell stories” in the sense of making stuff up. This May, during a devotional for our Faculty Senate meeting, I told my colleagues a story that I hoped was in the former category. And it was—once my colleague helped me see through…

Recently I had a vivid reminder of the value in the breadth of a liberal arts education. My son, who is a computer science major, has become a fan of live theater. When he texted me the title of an upcoming play that we could see together with my other son (a music therapy major),…

Our impulse to light the night with glowing colors at Christmastime is a good one. This is the time when “the people walking in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:1 NIV; see also Mt. 4:16) Colors are good parts of a good creation—signposts to what is true, good, and beautiful. Paul describes Christian…

When I teach our Natural Sciences Capstone seminar class, I must give the graduating seniors a challenging, cumulative assignment, appropriate to a 1-credit seminar course that meets once a week. In my class, these opposing requirements are met by assigning them to write a two-page proposal for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program…

In April, the actions of the Washington state legislature were discussed on the SPU faculty e-mail list, which might be a first. We celebrated as SB 5848 “Concerning licensure for music therapists” passed.Congratulations to my colleagues Carlene Brown, Christopher Hanson, Evelyn Stagnaro, Bobbie Childers, and others for their hard work to accomplish this. The bill…

“I will endeavor by a very simple and commonplace method to lead you by experience into the divine darkness,” wrote Nicholas of Cusa in 1453 to the monks at Tegernsee.Nicholas of Cusa, The Vision of God (New York: Cosimo, 2016), 2. In 2023, our faculty/staff reading group discussed Nicholas’s method in a conference room with…

If I could tell my college-aged self to read just one book, it would be The Lonely Man of Faith by Joseph B. Soloveitchik.It was published by Doubleday as a book in 2006, but its original form was an essay published in 1965 in Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought 7:2 (Summer 1965). To minimize…

We are in the middle of a run in the publication of “new histories.” In the five months after The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity was published, eight other books with “New History” in the subtitle were published in my library’s database, on topics from the evolution of mammals to Watergate. Hundreds…

In the previous post, I compared the arguments of overwhelmed NYU students to those of their organic chemistry professor. NYU professor Stephanie Lee’s tweet sums it up: “I could write compelling defenses for each party - students, Prof. Jones, my department, NYU admin - bc everyone is operating under different pressures.”Stephanie Lee, Twitter post, October…

You might have heard that organic chemistry professor Maitland Jones Jr. is no longer teaching at NYU. The news went global when Jones had his one-year contract taken away, not because of a crime or scandal, but because of a student petition against the way he taught his course. This news surprised me. I had…

Seven years ago, I took a teaching sabbatical in Burundi. When I set foot on U.S. soil again, I had the exact opposite of a sense of accomplishment. This ambivalence would continue. In fact, I’m still processing it now. Just this month, a faculty workshop reminded me of this when slides warned of the inevitable…

I made many mistakes in my oral qualifying exam, halfway through grad school. The first was probably that I wore a double-breasted blazer at least 5 years out of style, as a committee member noted at the beginning. More substantial was the fact that I stumbled over explaining my collaborator’s techniques to the committee, one…

In my work as a pre-med advisor, I help students navigate the pictures and words medical schools use to recruit students. Each school has a website and promotional materials making their case that they’re a good fit for YOU, the reader. One paradox of the Internet Age though is that the more information is available,…

In Part 1 of this essay, I argued that the structure of a flame is, at certain levels, similar to the structure of life. The flame suggests that human nature, and even divine nature, is self-gift with a purpose. The stress of burnout may be a sign that the gift is misaligned somehow. But once…