Math Professor Wins a Coveted Religion Award – New York Times
Math Professor Wins a Coveted Religion Award – New York Times: Continuing a recent trend in which the world’s richest religion prize has gone to scientists, John D. Barrow, a British cosmologist whose work has explored the relationship between life and the laws of physics, was named the winner yesterday of the 2006 Templeton Prize for progress or research in spiritual matters. Dr. Barrow will receive the $1.4 million prize during a ceremony at Buckingham Palace on May 3. The prize was created in 1972 by the philanthropist Sir John Marks Templeton, who specified that its monetary value always exceed that of the Nobel Prize. …Continuing a recent trend in which the world’s richest religion prize has gone to scientists, John D. Barrow, a British cosmologist whose work has explored the relationship between life and the laws of physics, was named the winner yesterday of the 2006 Templeton Prize for progress or research in spiritual matters…. Barrow Dr. Barrow will receive the $1.4 million prize during a ceremony at Buckingham Palace on May 3. The prize was created in 1972 by the philanthropist Sir John Marks Templeton, who specified that its monetary value always exceed that of the Nobel Prize.
A Call To All Artists
Here’s a call to action from Nietzsche: “We, the new, the nameless, the hard-to-understand, we firstlings of a yet untried future – we require for a new end also a new means, namely, a new healthiness, stronger, sharper, tougher, bolder, and merrier than any healthiness hitherto. He whose soul longs to experience the whole range of hitherto recognized values and desirabilities, and to circumnavigate all the coasts of this ideal “Mediterranean Sea” who, from the adventures of his most personal experience, wants to know how it feels to be a conqueror and discoverer of the ideal – as likewise how it is with the artist, the saint, the legislator, the sage, the scholar, the devotee, the prophet, and the godly Nonconformist of the old style: __ requires one thing above all for that purpose, great healthiness – such healthiness as one not only possesses, but also constantly acquires and must acquire, because one continually sacrifices it again, and must sacrifice it! __ And now, after having being long on the way in this fashion, we Argonauts of the Ideal, who are more courageous perhaps than prudent, and often enough shipwrecked and brought to grief, nevertheless, as said above, healthier than people would like to admit, dangerously healthy, always healthy again, __ it would seem, as if in recompense for it all, that we still have an undiscovered country before us, the boundaries of which no one has yet seen, a beyond to all countries and corners of the ideal known hitherto, a world so over-rich in the beautiful, the strange, the questionable, the frightful, and the divine, that our curiosity as well as our thirst for the possession thereof, have got out of hand __ alas! that nothing will any longer satisfy us!
Einstein Finds Inspiration in the Music of Mozart
Last year, the 100th anniversary of E=mc2 inspired an outburst of symposiums, concerts, essays and merchandise featuring Albert Einstein. This year, the same treatment is being given to another genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born on Jan. 27, 250 years ago. There is more to the dovetailing of these anniversaries than one might think.
The Greatest Thing a Soul Ever Does…….
From John Ruskin: British artist, scientist, poet, environmentalist, philosopher, and art critic.The greatest thing a soul ever does….. is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way
Destroying The National Parks
Yesterday’s New York Times featured an interesting but very disturbing editorial on forthcoming policy decisions which may wind back the clock on America’s National Park system…… Mother nature seems to be having something to say about her treatment of her ocean and sky lately. I wonder how she will react to more carelessness in our national parks?
Another poem – “Voluntary Servitude” by Mark Wunderlich
I did some research on the poet, Mark Wunderllch and found another poem of his that I liked. VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE In a valley in Wisconsin there is a graveyard where the graves are flooded by spring. You say, Don’t wreck me, and I say I won’t, but how can I know that? To see a man in shackles, how you feel about that, depends on whether the servitude is voluntary The bodies are intact in their gloves, soaked in a bath of ice…. In the dark she could hear it—dry, slipping onto boards like a stocking rolled from a leg…. Some think to say the bodies are intact is wrong…. Some shackles too— Some you can remove. But this story— you start in the middle, in the thick and marrow of it.
A poem from the Living Poetry Blog
I got this poem from Amy’s blog. She has the most wonderful poems there…. The Hammock Your hand pushes me away so that I float into the night, then swing back, back from the nebulae to our drifting conversation. Among the race of star demons what I saw out there– golden chains, the spindle, sirens chanting the music of the spheres– blurs and streaks across star-flung distances the chain-link fences can’t fence out. Between your hand and the hammock’s slow rocking the Void expands, twisting threads tautening, slackening, stretched almost to breaking: Do you feel that wobble of earth’s axis, space whirling past the ice-capped pole? The pines like judges stare down at us: What should we recant, here, tonight, as if we’d only just begun: Off-center already, losing equilibrium? The world-soul moving through the strung-out stars moves in threads that creak and moan, breathes between your mouth and mine. Pushing me away, you bring me home, your attraction drawing down the alchemical sign: Love draws the soul the way a magnet draws iron.
Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
For those of you who haven’t read Walter Benjamin’s text “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” here’s the complete text.
A Lesson From A Mountain Goat
I had a heart-opening experience while traveling with Josse to Glacier Park earlier this year on one of her art journeys. One day we were hiking a pristine mountain trail to a place called Hidden Lake – it is a crater lake high up in the park and the walk is about 6 miles round trip.
Sailing on the Ocean of Life
The voyage from nowhere to nothing and back beaten by drunk, brawling seas, sometimes will toss up a treasure like this: just hold to the stillness and see shadows of what, on the island of peace, waits with your name in her sigh…. Caroline Myss has these words to say on life is a spiritual journey from her book “Invisible Acts of Power.”… Use the power of faith as your anchor: faith that there is a reason why things happen as they do; faith that you will make it through a crisis; faith that you are moving forward to a better place.”
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