Monday Thought

Hi, I’m Elizabeth*, and I’m a Unitarian Universalist from New England.  Hi! I’m Stephanie, and I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints living in California.  We’ve been friends for more than a decade. We were both raised in our faith traditions and decided to stick with them as adults, and […]

In theological terms, we can say that nature transcends the human: It is prior to us and beyond us. Though we are part of it, and it a part of us, Nature is also radically other—vast, impersonal, unconcerned with our petty desires and designs.

This spring, I took a Judaism class. I’m deeply interested in Jewish mourning rites, and the class seemed like a good way to get better acquainted with some of the rudiments of the religion. While there, I got a somewhat different take on Noah and the flood. As a girl raised in a Christian household […]

In December 2020, my cousin died. Mourning, particularly in the time of Covid-19, is a complicated affair. Scant few people could attend the funeral, while hundreds attended virtually — including me.   I was on my couch, and the gas in my building had been turned off due to a leak. I was freezing, carrying small […]

As you read this, a metallic mass just a smidge smaller than my Subaru Forester hurdles through outer space at 11.947 kilometers per second. That’s 7.426 miles per second—or, to use a different set of imperial units, 12.313 Oregon Trails per hour.  Cost-effective, rugged, utile: Pioneer 10, the object in question, would certainly pass with […]

I can’t converse in Hebrew. I can’t hear it speak back to me in my own voice. I can’t even fumble with words and phrases like I’m learning the language for the first time. The survival of the Jewish people — and therefore the Jewish tradition — is in and of itself a tenant of contemporary […]

Here is a Monday Thought for your Wednesday. This post is co-published in partnership with our Brick House colleagues at Olongo Africa. It is difficult to come across atheists in Nigeria. In a country where hope seems perpetually lost in the fog of corruption and chaos; where you’d often hear tales of humans flying at […]

I am two years old when my grandmother, Nanna, feels a lump on the back of my neck. My Nanna immigrated from Italy’s southernmost Calabria region, arriving in Australia after World War II. She is both profoundly Catholic and deeply superstitious. Over the course of my life, she tells me stories of saints with gouged […]

When a snake sloughs its skin, it doesn’t lose its dreadfulness with its old shell.  You came to us with good news of salvation, we accepted it. You came through our borders uninvited and handed to us your books of alphabets. We embraced them even at the expense of our own tongue(s). You told us […]

They call Muhammad Samie the spell caster. Samie is 32 years old, and he has a background in chartered accounting. He is also a rising qawwali singer, lest you think that the square-framed glasses that rest on his nose speak to anything else. His work is the spiritual music of South Asia that is rooted […]