“Wow!” was my initial, unbridled reaction when I read about the Nobel committee’s selection of President Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize. I was in bed, reading the news on my iPhone, and leapt out to share it with the kids. Before I could say anything, I was greeted with, “Yeah, Dad, Obama won the [...]

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It’s got it all: atheism, spirituality, god, scifi, and good music!! Hulu’s got the first four eps up right now (and it doesn’t keep them forever), so go catch up. It’s too smart and too well written to stay on the air for long. It’s the story of Kings David and Saul transposed into a [...]

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For a few weeks when I first stopped being able to find time to blog, I kept windows open in Safari to the point that it was neigh on impossible to shut down my computer, for fear of losing all the wonderful and amazing links I was going to share! But then I got into [...]

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This is from years ago but truly, absolutely worth it: Lyrics (and, if you follow that link, here’s the final frame)

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A fascinating discussion/speculation about the position of women on earth and how that mirrors their position in heaven. Includes speculation about what might have been the course of humanity if the Abrahamic God was a female. via.

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We make sense of the world and our relation to it through the stories we tell.  Back in my young and wild Mormon days (riding bikes with the gang down the street of Japan, doing drive by conversions), I told the story of Joseph Smith to anyone who would listen.  The cool thing was that [...]

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I was listening to this the other day while packing and it made me cry (as it always does). If anything could make me a pacifist, it would be this song: Don McLean’s the Grave [wp_youtube]Z4G2iKDzHrs[/wp_youtube] This line, particularly: When the wars of our nation did beckon, A man barely twenty did answer the calling. [...]

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I grew up listening to music that was not what is generally considered age-appropriate. (Guy Lombardo, Tom Lehrer, Peter Paul & Mary, for example.) Jimmy Buffett was one of them. This song always makes me think of heaven. Not my heaven, perhaps, but it’s definitely his heaven. And it gets me every time I listen [...]

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[wp_youtube]k04KzgYRKrE[/wp_youtube] In place of the regularly scheduled Leaving the Garden series, I bring you Dr. King’s difficult journey that ultimately led to his acceptance of nonviolence and the rejection of American Christian political orthodoxy.  His Pilgrimage to Nonviolence is a fascinating and intimate revelation of his initial convictions, his questioning process, his doubts, and the [...]

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All the news (and blogosphere) seems able to talk about today is the fact that the official number of American soldiers killed in Iraq since we went back to war there has reached 4000. There was not one (un)lucky person who tips the scales to a nice, round, reportable number, but 4. And this morning, [...]

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