A View of the Lake
The lakes of northern Michigan were mysterious to me when I was growing up. There was always at least one undeveloped side and a few swampy coves on each. I saw the trees on the lake’s edge as the border…
Read more
Tag Archive: Religion/Spirituality
Psych 101 Class, Rat Lab Prove Helpful in Real Life
One of the most exciting classes I took in college was Psych 101, in which I was introduced to the ideas of B.F. Skinner. In a nutshell, Skinner believed that individuals do not create their own lives through free choices, but are created by their culture and its system of punishments and rewards.
For the first time in my life, I saw the obvious truth that had I been reared by different parents or in a different culture, I would have become a different person. Even something I thought of as precious as my religion was more or less trained into me. I wasn’t as free as I imagined.
Those Who Cast the First Stone
Recently I was reading a newspaper exposé about Phyllis Schlafly’s son, who has been quietly living a gay life for years. I was thinking back on the GOP convention, when the Republicans showcased Schlafly as their spokesperson for their strident and ultraconservative family values position.
This was unadulterated hypocrisy, considering that in the very moment of her eloquent highmindedness, she was secretly well aware of the deviance from traditional family values that had evolved out of her own personal family structure.
While I was reading this expose, I got a call from my daughter at college. She was preparing a speech for her Christian Ethics course, in which she had received a midterm warning. Ironically, her subject was Christianity and homosexuality, and she was at a loss for an approach.
Two Worlds
World Number One is darkness, life feeding on itself, forms eating other forms until they are eaten themselves. In this world, everything born is fated to be eaten by something—wild animals, vultures, insects, worms, microscopic bacteria, cancer cells. Every living…
Read more
What I Do Best
What I do best is remember I’m going to die someday. Especially when my life seems to be sailing smoothly, this sense that I’ll end in nothing, that I’ll simply fall off the edge of the world, is the strongest…
Read more
The Choice Of Emptiness
These are excerpt from a little known but important book, The Choice of Emptiness by Jim Ralston. We’ve published several chapters from this book before (Issue 86). Ralston’s story lives on in me, though; I’m moved, again and again, by…
Read more