Over the last 50 years, we have learned a lot about what helps children grow up to be psychologically healthy or unhealthy. Chief among those is the emotional climate in a family or simply put, the way parents treat their children and each other…A key element is listening with empathy. When parents learn to listen…
Diary
Diogenes the Dog; So you want to be a Cynic do you?
Diogenes was the first of a group of thinkers who became known as the Cynics, a term taken from the Greek kunikos, meaning “dog-like.” It reflects the determination of the Cynics to spurn all forms of social custom and etiquette, and instead live in as natural a state as possible. They asserted that the more…
Arresting of The Beautiful || Illustration by Sana Pearl Park
And, of course, the temple par excellence of culture is the modern museum in which the objects of art seamlessly mirror back to us the satisfaction (repressed, unconscious as it is) of our teleological drive to historical mastery bewitching ourselves into thinking we have achieved it. Art in this sense is double-edged: it is not…
The Will To Embrace: Sin and Family | Photography by Eric Cahan
“…the will to give ourselves to others and “welcome” them, to readjust our identities to make space for them, is prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity. The will to embrace precedes any “truth” about others and any construction of their “justice.” This will is absolutely indiscriminate and…
Prolepsis: This Is What The Future Will Look Like | Art by Nuam Gabo
“Prolepsis is a Greek theater word. It is when the crowd–which is usually all the normal people in the play–come out and tell you at the beginning what’s about to happen at the end of the story and the meaning it has. So that you, the audience–when you’re watching the play–can come to see the…
No one is ever born, no one can ever die | Art by Christopher Mir
Eternity by Tom Clark The god of war assured King Arsounas, “Do not be fooled by words. No life is taken. Know that no one was ever born, nor does anyone die.” In the violent mini-eternity of the warrior, combat is conducted according to a ritual formal as song: no one is ever born, no…
SOPA & PIPA: Why Digital Piracy Can’t Be Stopped
Above is a clip from This Week In Tech #332. Leo Laporte and Nilay Patel break down the SOPA/PIPA debate and have an intense conversation. Both agree that SOPA is terrible legislation and will create more problems than it could ever solve. However I completely agree with Leo that piracy is not actually a problem…
Elegy on Toy Piano By Dean Young
You don’t need a pony to connect you to the unseeable or an airplane to connect you to the sky. Necessary it is to love to live and there are many manuals but in all important ways one is on one’s own. You need not cut off your hand. No need to eat a bouquet….
God Has Breasts and Is Not Omnipotent
The bible never says that God is omnipotent or that he created out of nothing… We get our modern ideas of Gods omnipotence from the Hebrew name El-Shaddai wich is most often translated as “the almighty” but many scholars today suggest that God of the two mountains or the large breasted one would be a…
Tim Tebow, Religious Hypocrisy, Social Media and Our Need For Attention
I think a case could be made that the emergence of digital communication and online social media has made religious hypocrisy a more dangerous temptation today than we often recognize. Lee Siegel in his book Against the Machine, discusses how we hide behind false, “phantom” identities on the internet. It’s a medium we think fosters…