Sundays with William Blake: Some Thoughts on the Holy Spirit

I think of myself as a Catholic with a strong Unitarian bent.

A bivariate Gaussian distribution, also known as a "bivariate normal distribution."  I often think I can see the reflection of the minds of the mathematicians who study certain fields.  In the case of Gauss (1777-1855) I wonder what Gauss was expressing about himself in his exploration of the normal distribution.  Later the Gaussian distribution would become essential not only for modern statistics but also for understanding modern physics.  For example, Einstein connected the Gaussian distribution to Brownian motion and, therefore, diffusion in 1905.

Sundays with William Blake: There Is No Natural Religion, Meditations on Fantasy in Christian Life and Talking Honestly with God

I think that the hardest aspect of my Christian identity is bringing my feelings honestly to God.

Chaotic oscillators can be very much like haikus or koans.  In written form they are often very short.  They can be just a small system of three ordinary differential equations.  Chaotic oscillators are both predictable and not predictable.  A small difference in initial conditions can lead to profoundly different results.  And yet, as long as those initial conditions are within what is often a very wide range, the widely variable results all stay within certain bounds, as if tied by an unknown string...

Happy Earth Day & Sundays with William Blake

Happy Earth Day!

Because of family parties, I actually had to garden yesterday rather than today.

The spiral of a sunflower follows a very specific pattern known as the Golden Ratio, which is the limit of the ratio of the Fibonacci numbers as you approach infinity.  Not everything that people claim follows the Golden Ratio actually does - nautilus shells, for example, do not.  But sunflowers really do.  To see how the sunflower's pattern relates to the Golden Ratio, check out this tool called "Turn, then Grow."

Sundays with William Blake: Christ, Guanyin and the Divine Image

Who are we worshiping?

Guanyin, Bodhisattva of compassion, China, 12th Century 

Why has religion been the source of so much violence and pain? Or: Why the gun-owning, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic Christian fanatics known as the Amish make for such lovely neighbors.

Roger Owen asked on his blog an unanswerable question: why has religion been the source of so much violence and pain?  I'm excited about this question because I've thought about it a lot.

These guys disagree with just about everything you do.  They're just really pleasant about it.

What's Heaven Like?...

So at Bible study this morning we touched on the question "What's heaven like?"

To a non-Christian - maybe even some Christians - it sounds like a bit of a silly question.

But I love those kinds of conversations because they remind me that all life is story.

In Bible study we focused on Isaiah 60 and what it meant.  But one of my favorite answers didn't come from an engineer or an account executive.

It came after, from my dear friend Chrissy, whom I love dearly and means a great deal to me.

Chrissy's mentally handicapped, and has an IQ of about 80.  But she sometimes sees the world more clearly than most of the people I know, people trapped in the sound and fury of the everyday.