My roommate has a subscription to National Geographic. When I was younger my father got a subscription to it, but I would only look at the pictures. Now I actually read the articles. One article in particular from the December 2009 issue struck my interest.
It’s an article about a man who went and lived with the bush people known as the Hadza for two weeks. His portrait of them is of a content and happily ignorant people. They’re unsentimental and …

Read on »

Lately I’ve been thinking about all the time I spend doing things that just waste time. I waste so much time doing activities and spending time with people that don’t give me any real satisfaction.
Over the break I was at a friend’s apartment. I had an ok time, but at one point in the evening I realized that I really didn’t enjoy being with those people. We weren’t interested in the same things in life. They had different priorities and …

Read on »

Noah is an electrical engineering at UTD. I met him at a party of a mutual friend and was impressed with his intelligence and strong stance on Christianity. I decided to interview him on his stances and allow him to address some of the issues raised in the previous interview. The result is lengthy but interesting and I believe worth taking the time to read.

Read on »

Original Audio can be found here. I sound pretty bad in this, with lots of stuttering. Wouldn’t recommend listening to it, but it’s there if you want it.
Landan: Ok, I’m here with my good friend David and I’ve been doing a series on the relationship between science and religion. David is someone who used to belong to the Christian religion until he moved to atheism. So I think he can bring a unique perspective to this topic. So…David
David: Yes.
Landan: In …

Read on »

Christianity currently finds itself in the midst of an interesting transition. Young people have shown a greater willingness to leave behind their parents’ religious traditions than they have in the past. This is due in large part to the growing minority of the non-religious and an increased social acceptance of atheism (source 1, 2 ). Still, the majority of children who grow up in evangelical households will maintain their Christian identity, although often in a form that looks significantly different …

Read on »

I’d like to do a series on religion and it’s relation to scientific findings/reasoning. I know that many consider this topic long dead, but I feel that there’s some new perspectives and questions I can bring to the discussion.
There’s questions that I’ve wanted to ask for a long time, but have been afraid to ask. I want to explore these questions head on. I have so many great resources available from both sides of the theistic spectrum and I hope …

Read on »

I’ve written on Authenticity before.
I feel that the church is missing that a lot of times. This isn’t a pointing of fingers either, I’m part of the problem as well. There’s something about Church and being around other religious people that makes me afraid to open up. It’s as if my salvation depends on the validation of the people around me rather than on God.
My Dad was talking to me recently about how he had visited one of the older …

Read on »

I was listening to NPR today and this little nugget of a story came up. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104310443 Basically they scanned very religious people’s brains while they were praying. Apparently those who set aside time for prayer on a consistent basis become more compassionate and even have better immune systems. interesting quotes from the article

“You can sculpt your brain just as you’d sculpt your muscles if you went to the gym,” he says. “Our brains are continuously …

Read on »

One of my favorite directors, Andrei Tarkovsky, understood the power of water. It constantly changes it’s form, never the same. Film can capture it’s essence in a way that no other medium can.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXyKlqS07tc]
I love the rain. There’s something innately divine about it. Almost all religions give water some sort of significance. It’s the force that gives us life. We are dust and water, but more so water.
Jesus describes himself as the living water. Whenever I think of Christ in terms …

Read on »

“We love those who know the worst of us and don’t turn their faces away.”
- Walker Percy
I’m currently reading Augustine’s Confessions (link). It’s basically a book where Augustine describes his life of sin before he became committed to God and the way that he was saved from sin by God’s grace.
In the forward of my Oxford Press copy it talks about how the work was intended as a way to shut up a lot of those who were critical …

Read on »