In response to a gathering at Westmont College exploring the role of science in liberal arts education, Mr. Gates develops his ideas on how how the sciences help us understand the value and meaning of our lives.
Selected Readings
Selected Readings
Physicists have long sought to describe the universe in terms of equations. In this article, S. James Gates explains how research on a class of geometric symbols known as adinkras could lead to fresh insights into the theory of supersymmetry — and perhaps even the very nature of reality.
To be alive spiritually is to feel the ultimate anxiety of existence within the trivial anxieties of everyday life.
In this moving personal essay, Mr. Wiman traces three events in his life — "each shattering in his own way" — how his Christian faith and existential anxiety have shaped his imagination.
An essay to wake you up. Wiman tells the tense story of growing up in West Texas and his friend's hunting accident, which might've been his own. He writes about about faith with an intellectual edge and dry tone that is anything but dull.
Read The New Yorker article on brainstorming that Rex Jung and Krista discussed in the show, which includes discussion of MIT's Building 20.
In this speech, given as part of a workshop for Stuttering Foundation, Rabinowitz talks about his life with a stutter and the unexpected gift it became in his life.
"That's a tough spirituality. That's not any kind of sweet-by-and-by spirituality. That's a spirituality that takes on the world as it is and says, "I'm gonna figure this out one way or another." The mystic and the Moses."
Harding suggests in this essay that the dream is never finished but endlessly unfolding. He suggests that America's most important possibility for the world is not to dominate, threaten, or compete with, but to help each other in a search for common ground. He suggests that when we simply attempt to replicate our free-market materialism, we miss our most vital connections. From this, he opens the possibility that a new conversation may begin — one that might initiate a deeper journey concerning the possibilities of human community across all geographical lines.
Ms. Alexander cites this classic essay that says that poetry "forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action."
