Just what is consciousness and how does it work? What does it mean that I am aware? That I am aware of myself? Does it arise entirely from the brain? Is it a function of a soul? Are other animals conscious? How would we know? Does individual consciousness survive beyond death? And what about ... zombies?
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Backward Miracle
Every once in a while, we need prose, not poetry, says the poet. We need just the vessel with the wine and nothing more. We need a single loaf and the single fish and that is all.
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On Nursery Rhymes, New Organs and Human Happiness
Articles of note from month of October
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Featured Artist: Leah Damgaard-Hansen
Feeling intensely uprooted at a young age made me realize that to keep a coherent sense of self I was going to have to take root in something other than a cultural or linguistic identity. This is of course no finished project but something I am continually engaged in, including in my creative practice. I think primarily in terms of creating worlds.
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Not Many Wise, Not Many Noble
Inside the ‘museum’ was a pile of artifacts — four-hundred-year-old Bibles, sacred heart pictures, a reproduction of the shroud of Turin, old motorcycles, more dinosaurs, and a neon sign that read: “Jesus Saves.”
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Everydayness & the Restless Heart
Education, fundamentally, is about human flourishing, and in order for an education to succeed in engendering flourishing, it is necessary for it to reach the heart. It’s not enough to have a perfect grasp on Augustine, or to write a flawless essay on To Kill a Mockingbird. When I discover that the questions Augustine asks are my questions, or that Atticus Finch and I have something fundamental in common, human flourishing starts to happen.
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Hammurabi the Humane
While the ancient world was a world that may very well have been more violent than ours, the law codes of even the most ancient peoples (flawed though those laws were and as ours are) echo through the ages with a basic, humane instinct for justice, mercy and peace.
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Loving Your Neighbor: Liturgies in Pandemia
We are not “brains on a stick” but we instinctively seek out rituals that shape our loves – for better or for worse. At our worst, we gang up on each other and cut each other down. At our best, we give our lives for one another. It all depends on what liturgies we've been practicing.
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On Van Gogh, Swifts and Stones
a few waning-summer pieces that caught our interest
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Featured Artist: Tatiana Nikolova-Houston
Since 2008, Tatiana Nikolova-Houston has dedicated her life to re-creating and re-interpreting Byzantine and South Slavic iconography and manuscript illuminations as a ministry and mission to Western audiences. Sacred Illuminations grew out of her fascination with Slavic manuscripts, unique in their eclectic decorations inspired by Byzantine arts, Persian carpets, Bulgarian folk arts, and even Celtic designs. The illuminations reflect the joy of spirituality and provide a glimpse of the Heavenly reality, of the radiance of the Holy Spirit within everything in God’s Creation and the spiritual symbolism of Holy Scripture.
