“Who is this ‘God’ in whose name so many diverse and troubling things take place? Why is it assumed to be good to affirm one’s faith in such an entity? Why is it thought to be wicked to deny its existence? Most striking about so much talk of ‘God,’ both to affirm and to deny, is the way in which many who use this language seem to know exactly to what and/or whom it refers. God is spoken of as if God is the Wizard of Oz or the great CEO in the sky or Grampa or the Grand Inquisitor. God is the clock-maker, the puppeteer, the author. God is the light, the mother, the wind across the sea, the breath in every set of lungs. God is the horizon. God is all of these things. But what if God is none of them? What if every possible affirmation that can be made of God, even by the so-called religions of revelation, falls so far short of the truth of God as to be false? Who is the atheist then?” James Carroll, a columnist for The Boston Globe, meditates on the ubiquity of God in the news cycle, and the similarly common assumption of who God is: something or someone knowable — for better or for worse — and not the radical otherness, the profoundly incomprehensible entity, that other biblical traditions describe, on Common Dreams.
