Galvan’s experiment was quite ingenuous. She had kids, teens, and adults play a pirate video game while inside an fMRI scanner, with their heads restrained. Their arms were free to push buttons. With each successful turn of the game, they won some gold–on the screen flashed either a single gold coin, a small stack of…
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Who says my spelling is bad? | Illustration by Justin Mezzell
Consistent spelling was a great way to ensure clarity in the print era. But with new technologies, the way that we write and read (and search and data-mine) is changing, and so must spelling. … The notion that words can and should be spelled only one way is a fairly recent invention. “The phrase ‘bad…
How To Destroy Love: Eros The Misunderstood Love | Art by Amanda Rae Long
“Now EROS makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.” … “Without Eros, sexual desire like every other desire is a fact about ourselves. Within Eros it is rather about the Beloved.”…
There is no Room in the Bible for Piper’s “Masculine Christianity”
“God is spirit,” announces Jesus by the well (John 4:24). This is one of only two definitional propositions about God in scripture. The other is “God is love.” … This is a blog post in accordance and solidarity with Rachel Held Evens and her challenge for men to push back against John Pipers “masculine Christianity.”…
Suppressing Feelings Doesn’t Make Them Go Away
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…
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…
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…
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…