RELAXING IN PUBLIC CAN SOMETIMES bring unexpected consequences. Seated in the Walnut Creek BART station in the spring of 1980, I was reading my well-thumbed copy of 1984. So engrossed was I in Orwell’s pessimistic prose that I didn’t hear…
Month: January 2025
365 Names of God: “The One Who Spoke and the World Came Into Being”
THE ONE WHO SPOKE AND THE WORLD CAME INTO BEING expresses a pretty profound metaphor, at least to those students of the Torah unbothered by anthropomorphism. Think about the many possible ways to spin a creation myth: divine entities dreaming…
Words to Bring Back: “Quotidian”
– Definition: adj ordinary or everyday, especially when mundane. – Used in a sentence: If you can’t find pleasure in the quotidian, you likely won’t find it anywhere else. – Why: To seize our eyeballs in the current attention economy,…
LAUGH. SEE?”
— J.R. “Bob” Dobbs
Looking Out, Looking In
(A recent sermon.) SOMETIMES, A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE CAN be a good thing. A lot of perspective? Even better. That point is illustrated in this week’s Torah reading, when Joseph admonishes his brothers after they fib that their father told them…
Aside
July 4, 1776 – January 20, 2025. Magna dum duravit.
Audiomobile
“COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE…” So ran one of the many “found sounds” (today called “samples”) on the pass-around tape collages that were a fringe benefit of membership in the Neo-Pagan Society of Diablo Valley College in the early-to-mid-1980s. (Accent…
The Zine Scene
A LONG TIME AGO, IN a post office far, far away, our mailbox was fraught with wonder and excitement. In those cultural Dark Ages of pre-public Internet access, creative folk could communicate through the medium of “zines” – homegrown/amateur magazines,…
Pocket Theology
BEFORE WE BEGIN, LET’S HAVE an agreed-upon definition or two (c. OED, mostly): mystic 1. one who believes that union with or absorption into the Deity or the Absolute, or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, may…
First Graf: Sidereus Nuncio
PERHAPS THE GREATEST THING ABOUT Galileo Galilei’s first publication, translated from the Latin as The Sidereal Messenger, is his sense of adventure at being the first known human to telescopically observe and painstakingly chronicle the night sky. Galileo recorded his…