Quantum Theory and the Observer’s Quest in ‘Swann’s Way’
The structure of the fictional universe established in ‘Swann’s Way’ echoes, with uncanny persistence, the features of the quantum world as it began to take form in scientific thinking in the early 1900s: an understanding of reality as essentially granular, indeterminate, and relational.
How ‘The Pathless’ Explores Our Fear of Freedom
If we all walked the same path, history would be a flat line instead of a web. It would collapse into a single dimension instead of exploding outward toward the infinitely new. It would become the Godslayer’s realm as he seeks to impose the One True Path: static and dead.
Trust the Force (All of It): Lessons in Balance from ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’
Both sides of the Force are needed for balance, but either side used in isolation poses a problem. Too much disorder and the world falls apart; too much order, and there’s no room to create something new. When entropy and entaxy are acting in partnership, however, we get evolution. Growth. Change.
Time is Ignorance: From C.S. Lewis to Carlo Rovelli
The stunning implication of this idea is that if we we were able to see things in wholes, not just the parts that are connected to us—if we were capable of perceiving every nuance of every interaction in the universe with perfect clarity as it happened—time would cease to exist in any meaningful sense.
Three Lightning Rods: or, What the Universe Tells Me About God
Three core facts about the universe have embedded themselves so deeply into my paradigm lately that they now essentially function as lightning rods in my spiritual life. If you strip away absolutely everything else that’s foundational about my worldview, these three facts—and the rabbit holes they’ve taken me down—would remain.
Learning How to Embrace Being Wrong
A certain pattern in my life has become clear: Positive change almost exclusively comes after I’ve let go of an assumption or belief—when I’ve allowed myself to accept that I might have been mistaken, or even just misguided, about something I previously held to be unassailably true.
Peace in the Dark
As co-creators and participants in the universe’s drama, we naturally crave greater perspective, greater understanding – things we traditionally believe that light gives us. But God is expressed in the night as much as in the day. And the dark is where God changes us.
All the Ages I’ve Ever Been
I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be. This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in…
Yes, I Have a Pulse
If my relative silence here (since December 2013, good Lord) didn’t tip you off already, I guess it’s time to admit: 2014 has been a doozy. In some respects, this has been the most challenging year Luke and I have spent in Colorado. It’s also been, by a considerable margin, the most rewarding. I got a new job, diving headlong into the craziest six…
Shadows and Mirrors
Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the Earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see;…
Survival of the Indifferent
We seem rather preoccupied with the end of the world lately. From The Hunger Games to The Walking Dead, the end of life as we know it has become commonplace in popular fiction. At least half of the new book releases in the young adult market for the past 5 years have featured a dystopian setting or…
The Epic in the Ordinary
One of my favorite modern parables is G.K. Chesterton’s Tremendous Trifles. It’s short and sweet – just over a thousand words – but it’s become something of a touchstone for me in the years since I first read it. (It also kicks off an equally wonderful collection of essays published under the same title. Read them all: they’re…
Creation vs. Consumption
I write for a living – in two different ways. I’m a web content writer/editor for an Internet marketing firm, which means I output around 13,000+ words a week, translating into nearly a thousand pages/blogs/articles a year. In short: I write a lot. And most of the time, it feels good, because it’s measurable work…
Vader Ethics
With all the hoopla surrounding the new Star Wars trilogy, I’ve fallen back into an old habit that once came quite naturally: navigating towering expectations and crackpot speculation about the future of the galaxy far, far away. Some people are partying like it’s 1999 again, others are still nursing the hangover the prequels left – me,…
Merry Christmas
This is the paradox of [Christmas]; that henceforth the highest thing can only work from below. Royalty can only return to its own by a sort of rebellion… Olympus still occupied the sky like a motionless cloud molded into many mighty forms; philosophy still sat in the high places and even on the thrones of the…
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gravity lens 