Consciousness is never something I’ve thought very deeply about in the past. In my younger days I would’ve thought of it as the soul that is a separate substance from the body. Later on I would’ve seen it as an emergent property of physical processes where consciousness is simply the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. However, upon reading David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God: Being Consciousness Bliss, I actually engaged for the first time what all the features of consciousness entail and whether or not emergence or other aspects of mechanical nature are sufficient to explain it.

My Easter reflections are coming a couple of weeks late, but better late than never. One of the things I find fascinating about the Gospels is that they do not actually describe how Jesus rose from the dead. There are no descriptions of him removing the burial wrappings, the stone being rolled away as Jesus emerges, or an angelic choir singing while he rises from the grave in power. Instead, all we have, at least in the canonical Gospels, are appearances after the fact.

I’ve attempted to write about this before. My junior year of high school, I lost the innocent certainty in my faith I had had since childhood. At first I thought that loss of certainty was a loss of faith, but I now see that it wasn’t that. Or at least not quite so. Doubt became a constant companion of mine. I spent the next ten years trying to assuage that doubt by throwing myself headlong into the evangelical Christian practice of apologetics.