Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget is what many would call a manifesto on the current state of the Internet. A computer scientist and supposed father of virtual reality, Lanier uses this book to air his lamentations about how how the Internet has descended into a land of anonymous trolls, something which it wasn’t really [...]
Despite my personal beliefs of spiritual openness and freedom, I never forget my native religious language of Christianity. I don’t let that limit me spiritually, but I also don’t exclude it from my worldview. Since I read many books about spirituality from many different faiths and traditions, I constantly have to check my natural Christian [...]
Religion evolution seems to be the latest trend in the world of intellectuals, seculars, and atheists trying to model religion into something logical. These new trendsetters, offering a softer, yet still intellectual examination of religion’s roots and evolution over the ages, seem to have replaced the angry atheists led by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. [...]
For a variety of reasons, I do not usually venture off the nonfiction path. I think the main reason is the ease to which I can find books that interest me. It is much easier for me to walk into a bookstore and go straight for a topic rather than pour through the massive fiction [...]
Deepak Chopra’s 2008 book The Third Jesus is an attempt to understand three distinct manifestations of this elusive person: the historical Jesus, the theological Jesus created by the church, & the spiritual Jesus available to those that can achieve what Chopra calls a God-consciousness. Using the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (trust me, [...]
This year I read twenty books that earned my coveted 5-star rating. Here, in no particular order, are the ten I feel were the best of those twenty.
1. In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and The Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language: Arika Okrent [review]
2. Neither [...]
On September 3, 2008, Sarah Palin stood before the Republican National Convention and gave a speech that ushered in a new era of right-wing rhetoric once confined to talk radio pundits. As soon as Palin finished her mavericky tirade against President Obama and community organizers, a new breed of gasbags was born, complete with fallacy-ridden [...]
In the weeks leading up to the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta, Georgia, Terry Hitchcock ran 75 consecutive marathons. Hitchcock ran from Minneapolis to Atlanta to raise awareness to the plight of children in single-parent households. A single parent because of his wife Sue’s death to breast cancer, Hitchcock decided he wanted to try to [...]
As the only person in my family born and bred in Wisconsin, I have had life experiences that were not available to my Minnesota kin. For example, I have been to and enjoyed many cheese houses in my time. Family traditions of babies and toddlers sampling the local brew are commonplace in America’s Dairyland. Growing [...]
Languages have been a source of personal fascination and interest since an eighth grade French course I took back in the day. I think it is simply amazing that people can look at an object like a tree and have so many different ways to say the word tree. Along with French, I have had [...]
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