February 2012
“Modern discourse is not really comfortable with the word “soul,” and in my opinion the loss of the word has been disabling, not only to religion but to literature and political thought and to every humane pursuit. In contemporary religious circles, souls, if they are mentioned at all, tend to be spoken of as saved or lost, having answered some set of divine expectations or failed to answer them, having arrived at some crucial realization or failed to arrive at it. So the soul, the masterpiece of creation, is more or less reduced to a token signifying cosmic acceptance or rejection, having little or nothing to do with that miraculous thing, the felt experience of life, except insofar as life offers distractions or temptations.”
—Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred – The Chronicle of Higher Education examines how we talk about souls, an interesting parallel to how we talk about being human. (via)
“To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to remember unnecessary details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detailed definitions. It is enough for us to have an abstract, the essence that is needed to process the information and relate it to others. Should we need the details, we can look them up within seconds. Similarly, we do not have to be experts in everything, because we know where to find people who specialise in what we ourselves do not know, and whom we can trust. People who will share their expertise with us not for profit, but because of our shared belief that information exists in motion, that it wants to be free, that we all benefit from the exchange of information.”
—We, the Web Kids – an essay by Polish political writer and commentator Piotr Czerski lays out a manifesto for the generation nursed on the web. (via curiositycounts)
Hozuki Akane ~ Gyakuten Sisters' Theme 2005
Sugimori Masakazu
Phoenix Wright || Hozuki Akane (Ema Skye) ~ Gyakuten Sisters’ Theme 2005
“I don’t like most people. I really, really don’t. I don’t like other people or a lot of people. But other than that, I’m really fun to be around.”
—Amy Poehler (via bloodisthenewblackk)
Pass This On
The Knife
The Knife - Pass This On
“The thing about patriarchy is that individual men, gay and straight, are often really wonderful people who you love deeply, but they have internalized some really poisonous shit. So every once in a while they say or do something that really shakes you because you’re no longer totally certain they see you as a human being, and you feel totally disempowered to explain that to them.”
—This happens to me all the time, and it always hits me like a slap in the face. (via lasluchasdelcorazon)
“While anxiety is defined by uncertainty, human anxiety is greatly amplified by our ability to imagine the future, and our place in it, even a future that is physically impossible. With imagination we can ruminate over that yet to be experienced, possibly impossible scenario. We use this creative capacity to great advantage when we envision how to make our lives better, but we can just as easily put it to work in less productive ways — worrying excessively about the outcome of things. Some concern about outcomes is essential to success in meeting life’s challenges and opportunities. But at some point, most of us probably worry more than we need to. This raises the questions: How much fear and worry is too much? How do we know when we have skipped the line from normal fear and anxiety to a disorder?”
—Searching the brain and for the roots of fear and anxiety (via curiositycounts)
