I remember the primal anguish that is born out of the belief that God is the source of both love and pain. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve observed that the feeling toward the universe it engendered is very similar to that of a hostage, a victim of abuse, a prisoner. Instead of creating a subjectivity of love in freedom, of caritas and kindness, and peace, it seemed to create an obsessive and paradoxical longing and fear that felt so meaningful…
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” – William James Recently, I participated in an online discussion in the comments of an article written by a prominent friend/adviser to the late Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson & Jehovah’s Witnesses, by Firpo Carr The Michael Jackson case and the issue of child abuse are both important to me, but I didn’t really know who Firpo Carr was when I made my first comment. I’d…
Would you like to see your name written in beautiful Arabic letters? The author of My Name in Arabic is offering framed tags for free. I’ve reduced them 50% for display here, but I’ve got the originals for email signatures. PLEASE stop requesting me to do these for you! I don’t know Arabic – click on the above link for requests. Here is the simple image for “Heidi”: Heidi has no equivalent I know of in Arabic. However, it’s funny…
I ended up writing such a long reply to a question posed on a previous post that I’m posting it as well. Vance from Meditations on an Eyeball asked: Heidi, as a “pragmatic contextual ethicist with a spiritual sensibility†do you think there are situations where it would be wrong for a woman to choose to terminate her pregnancy? I am assuming that you do not reject the concepts of right and wrong because in my understanding those notions are…
Peace be in you. Peace be through you. I feel a great urge for peace today. I am thinking about some of the wise and kind people that I have met, and the way I felt when I was near them. There are people of the book(s). There are people of people, so to speak. There are people of the cosmos. Each have their strengths and blind spots, but they share some things in common. Such people seem to leave…
I was looking at my dissertation today, wondering if I can yet make a readable book out of it. Now that I’ve got a little distance from what was an agonizing process (at least until the last bit, when I actually started enjoying it), it seems better than I thought at the time. Today I’m posting a very select few of the quotations I used as a kind of shorthand that helps me remember the train of thought that’s at…