Mick-Rick Essays on the Sacred and Profane

About the Book

This second Mick-Rick book begins by posing ten questions to which the authors independently respond with short essays. This format contrasts with the debates of book one. (The Mick-Rick Debates: Controversies in Contemporary Christianity) The ten Questions touch on fundamental issues facing today’s Christians such as suffering, life after death, religious cosmology, moral principles and others. The intention of the questions is not to provide pat answers but, rather, to stimulate reflection on the nature and content of Christian Faith in the context of the modern world.

The second part of the book consists of two essays. In Before and After the Big Bang, Rick argues it is possible to live in both the worlds of materialism as represented by science and the immaterial world of religion. Religion or the sacred provides meaning for life; science or the profane provides for our material needs.

Mick holds the idea of traffic between the natural and supernatural destroys the foundations of modern knowledge. In his essay, On Our Own But not Alone, he suggests that to attain maturity we must also gain autonomy, neither of which survives in a world invaded by the supernatural.

The book concludes with a debate on the nature of Constructs that are key mental tools used in religious and philosophical discourse.

Similar to the first book, the interlocutors, Michael Maasdorp (Mick) and Richard Arthur DeRemee (Rick) conducted their conversations over the Internet on the Radical Faith web site (http://homepages.which.net/~radical.faith/index.htm).

About the Author

Brief Author Biographies Michael Maasdorp (Mick) is a member of an Anglican religious community, The Society of the Sacred Mission, located in Durham, England. He was born, raised and educated in South Africa. After careers as a businessman and parish priest he devoted himself to writing on matters of faith and maintaining the Radical Faith web site. Richard Arthur DeRemee (Rick) retired from the Mayo Clinic after more than thirty years as a physician and professor of medicine. He was born and raised in Minnesota and in the Lutheran faith (ELCA). In retirement he devotes his energies to thinking and writing on religious and philosophical issues.