About

Hello.

Thank you for visiting. I’m Jessica.

Faith? Hope? What do you believe and hope in? I’ve believed and hoped in a lot of things over the years. Many of them have let me down or just faded. Some things I want to believe and hope in are stubbornly elusive to my weak trusting ability. So I read and think and read and analyse and try to understand. Though logical reason and rational thought can’t deliver us fully into faith or hope, they can lead us to the door. If we have some comprehension and justification for why we believe or hope in something then we are more likely to hold onto that belief and hope. And without hope, life is bleak.

As part of this wrestling, over-thinking and running from nihilism, words started to flow from my head to the page. Writing forces you to clarify what you think and why you think it. Writing forces you to pay close attention to what you read.

So, I often write. Though I less often publish because I’m slow at crafting and finishing. I write about what awes me and what scares me. I write at the intersection of science and faith, at the limits of what we can and cannot know, thus hopefully rendering the boundary less of a trip hazard. For it is so often at this paradoxical boundary—divine sovereignty versus human responsibility, God created everything but is not the author of evil, science gave us smartphones but can’t tell us the exact climate of our hometown in 50 years—that we err, either assuming more than we can know and creating false dichotomies that torment the analytically minded or concluding we can know nothing.

A physicist and meteorologist by training, philosophy was, perhaps, a natural progression. For all physicists quickly learn, as Heisenberg so deftly puts it, that the belief “that we could describe the world or at least parts of the world without any reference to ourselves” was an “illusion.”

Maybe my words will help someone else. So, I’ve put them here.

~Jessica