2026-05-05

Driving home, I passed a small white house with a screened porch and a magnolia in the yard, and for half a second I thought it was the Childhood Home. It wasn’t, of course. I do not live anywhere near where I grew up. But the resemblance was specific enough that I sat with it at the red light, the way you sit with a song on the radio you forgot you knew.

Mother called twenty minutes after I got in. She had been to the doctor, results were fine, she sounded relieved.

We talked for a while about the garden, then about my brother, then in the way these things happen, about whether her neighbor would ever come back to Faith Bible Church. My mother said something I want to write down before I lose the exact phrasing.

She said, “I don’t know how to talk to her about it. She thinks belief is something you arrive at by adding things up. I don’t think I’ve ever added anything up.”

I didn’t say anything for a few seconds, because what she had described in passing is most of what Alvin Plantinga has been arguing for forty years. Reformed Epistemology. Properly Basic Belief. The claim that belief in God can be rational without being inferred from premises, in the way our belief in other minds is rational without being inferred from premises. My mother has never read Plantinga. She would not enjoy Warranted Christian Belief. She has lived the position he defends, the way some people live a grammar without being able to parse it.

What I notice is how much harder her version is to argue with than the version in the book. The book invites you to engage. The grammar just sits there. You can ask her to add things up, and she will tell you, gently, that this is not the kind of thing she does.

I told her I loved her. I said the tomatoes are in. She asked if I was eating enough.

It strikes me, just now, that “is this person reasoning the way the book recommends” and “is this person available to be reasoned with the way the book recommends” are different questions, and the second matters more. I do not have a tidy thought about that yet.