“Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am…Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines…you are forced into direct experience [which] inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience.” Michael Crichton, Travels In the process of … Continue reading Living Abroad and Our Sense of Self
After the most unique, and commonly-experienced year in our lifetimes, the widespread experience of burnout is upon us. Like many people reading this, I also feel burned out. In my case, as a teacher and writer, my work exists as a constant pressure; it sits in my mind even when I shut off my computer. … Continue reading Unique Burnout; Unique Recovery
An hour into the experience, about 10 minutes before we began to eat, I thought to myself, “how could a dozen or so educated women talk about food for an hour without getting bored and switching topics?”
The demand to be authentic is so commonplace that it has lost its meaning. ‘Today, there is little premium placed on being authentic,’ writes the American philosopher Gordon Marino in his moving meditation The Existentialist’s Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age (2018). The increasing prevalence of social media constructions of ourselves, … Continue reading Performative Authenticity: Mass Society in Real Time
At night we approached the loss of the other Not merely a thought, but the possibility of being… lost in the abyss, So we retreated into our sacred place, where the pale of past daylight Faintly shone between our lips, in a present kiss. Artifice light shines not through skin pressed together. Neither can the … Continue reading 30 More Years of Otherness
"...overcoming otherness is bringing our uniqueness to a situation not originally intended to accept it, and then translating and transforming the situation so the uniqueness can feel at home. "
It is as if the neurological science of memory, which correlates precisely with the workings of our imagination, has been transposed into a work of social progress. In a very real way, we have embedded confusion in a work that requires clarity.
To be saved by grace sounds simple enough, grammatically at least. We are born into sin, and redeemed by a sacrificial love which we do not deserve. Baptized at 11, I seemed to have passed the test. Sunday school stuff, really. Let’s go to the all you can eat buffet together, laugh a little, and … Continue reading The Ways of Grace
Behind opaque doors doctors were battling for his life. Hooked up to the I.V. with the blood of his father and grandfather being pumped into his veins, the son was receiving medicine to stay out of septic shock. Trying to release another blockage, he was fighting sickness and poison on all internal fronts. He was … Continue reading Quick Reactions
When the detained people who stormed the Capitol are prosecuted, my guess is the charges will have something to do with sedition, destroying property, or threatening lives. Democracy will be defended, but it is this terrorism that needs to be tried.
