I’ve recently accepted the opportunity to coordinate MIT’s awesome interfaith dialogue program: The Addir Fellows. Addir is an ancient Sumerian word that means ‘bridge’.
Here’s my latest Tuesday’s in the Chapel talk where I discuss some of the reasons I’m so excited to promote interfaith dialogue (mp3).
I was recently updating my ‘What is Blue Ocean Faith?‘ page and realized that it’s probably worth me having a post on what we call our Blue Ocean Faith Perspectives. But I’m not actually going to write anything, I’m just going to copy and paste from the Blue Ocean Faith website. Continue reading
from sleepingmitstudents.tumblr.com
Sleep deprivation is often part of the MIT student experience. One of my dreams (pun intended) is that MIT can come to have a healthier sleep culture.
In this week’s Tuesday’s in the Chapel, I talk about why I see this as such an important issue—both based on my personal experience as an MIT student and from a spiritual perspective.
There’s no transcript this time because this was talk was completely unscripted—which is very unlike me. In addition to the audio, the text selections1usually in these selections I like to include some connection to non-religious stuff for the sake of inclusivity, but since I did this one with virtually no prep, I defaulted to Bible verses that were top of the mind. I used are below.
Notes:
| 1. | ↑ | usually in these selections I like to include some connection to non-religious stuff for the sake of inclusivity, but since I did this one with virtually no prep, I defaulted to Bible verses that were top of the mind. |
Bringing together this summer’s Pixar blockbuster Inside Out, classic episodes of the original Star Trek and the gargantuan, impenetrable novel Infinite Jest, here’s my Tuesday’s in the Chapel talk for this semester (as audio and transcript):
First Reading:
From Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, p. 695:
Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile… One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.
In my previous post about centered sets, I proposed the idea that there is some “Good Life” that serves as the center of the human set. To reiterate, even if all of us would have very different ideas about what that good life is, the idea is still that there’s one center. Now, I have no idea if this is true and I’ll make no attempt to prove it. But I wanted to talk a little bit about how I personally think about this idea of a “center”. Continue reading