by Thomas Schenk “Sunrise” by FotoArt MB is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 For many young Catholics, at least when I was growing up, “transubstantiation” was the biggest word we knew. It refers to the process by which a priest transforms bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, the basis for the Catholic belief in the sacrament of holy communion. I had lost my faith, what little I had ever had, by the time I was fourteen. By... Read more
by Leigh Anderson Even though I’ve never considered myself a poet, I recently decided to take a class on writing poetry. My eyes were opened to a world of writing that wasn’t about rhyming or alliteration, but more about connecting to both the inner and outer worlds. Poetry has long been revered for its ability to nourish the soul and promote healing on many levels. This was new to me. From providing cathartic release to cultivating mindfulness, deepening our connection... Read more
by Thomas Schenk From: Wikimedia commons. Last month, for the first time I witnessed a total solar eclipse. It was an experience I can only characterize as spiritual. We live in a culture that has long characterized God as some large human-like being existing somewhere on high. But if anything in the real world is God-like, it is the sun. Just about everything about us is dependent on the sun. All of the energy that went into the intricate construction of... Read more
by SNS Guest (Today’s presentation is by guest artist Sharmon Davidson. See bio below.) Artist Statement My earliest memories are of a preoccupation with careful examination of the world around me, and with making marks on paper to represent what I saw. From this developed a desire to communicate through line and color what cannot be expressed in words. My work originates from a deep belief in the sanctity of the earth, and in the underlying unity of everything in our... Read more
by SNS Guest Source: Stockvault (Today’s article is by guest writer Dwayne Schulz. For a brief bio, see below.) From a naturalistic perspective life is often thought to be meaningless because it arose from cosmic processes that are ultimately random in nature. These processes include the Big Bang, the chance emergence of self-replicating molecules and the role of random mutation in the evolution of Homo Sapiens. Indeed, there are thinkers like Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss who assert this explicitly. Let’s call... Read more
by Eric Steinhart An old story from Plato: The ancient Greek scientist Timaeus is getting ready to narrate his Theory of Everything, his theory of the origin and structure and purpose of the universe. His lecture will summarize most of the best science of the day, including cosmology, basic physics, chemistry, and biology. Timaeus was sort of an ancient Greek version of Carl Sagan (or maybe Sagan was a modern version of Timaeus!). But before getting into the science, Timaeus... Read more
by SNS Guest Credit: rawpixel.com (Today’s article is by guest writer Herman Matthews. For a brief bio, see below.) This is my attempt using logic to look at Who am I? We are all aware of the world. We are all aware of ourselves. And some of us ask questions like: Who am I? Where am I? What am I doing here? These are universal questions, so there are many “answers” in different cultures and traditions. But ultimately these questions cannot be answered with our... Read more
by James Jarrett Credit: fran_kie. Adobe Stock One of the most valuable invitations I have received along my journey is the invitation to embrace paradox. What is a paradox, you ask? A paradox is when any two or more contradictory phenomena coexist within the same larger phenomenon. Linguistically, a paradox can be described as “both/and” instead of “either/or.” In terms of logical syllogism, sometimes “If this is true, then that is false” can become “Both this is true and that is... Read more
by Thomas Schenk Credit: Jonathan From Flickr The mind likes patterns. It finds them everywhere. Sometimes these patterns actually exist, and sometimes the mind imposes them where they don’t actually exist, and sometimes the mind simply invents them for the joy of it. The fist of these is a basis for science, the third a basis for art, and the second is a basis for the broad realm of illusions. It is far easier to remember something that is organized... Read more
by SNS Guest (Today’s article is by guest writer KaZ Akers. For a brief bio, see below.) I’m writing from a borrowed PC somewhere between Barking Sands and Kalaheo, Hawaii. Where? Exactly. Why? Early this morning a cup of coffee was accidentally “catapulted” onto my MacBook Air. I got the kiss of death on the computer screen: a white folder with a black question mark in it. What does that mean? Au revoir, MacBook Air. After it was dried out with a hair... Read more
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