Collie's Bestiary

Blatant and inaccurate double standards As I've previously noted, I was not happy with how the second chapter was progressing. To my increasing dismay, things only got worse: we are introduced to the so-called original "High God" or "Sky God" of the "ancient Mesopotamians, Vedic Indians, Greeks and Canaanites," which is a "primitive monotheism" Armstrong [...]

The first book by Karen Armstrong which I read was A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It was absolutely amazing to me — chock-full of new ideas, fascinating religious philosophy, and beautiful writing. Since then I have read a few others as well by Armstrong, and I was delighted [...]

(another of the very short papers for the class on the spirituality of creativity) I know of several works of art with a mythic element which I find inspiring — I even created some of them. For this assignment, however, I picked the one I've known and loved the longest: Wagner's Flight of the Valkyries. [...]

On Saturday I was very pleased to get to go to the ballet again, with my delightful companion, to see "Carmen." It was danced by the wonderful Ballet San Jose, with the marvelous orchestration performed by Symphony Silicon Valley. "Carmen" was preceded by the unfortunately titled short piece "Who Cares?" by George Balanchine (e.g. "What [...]

This was a quick one-page paper written for one of my classes, which has a wonderful name: "Tree of Brilliant Fruit: Finding Spiritual Wisdom Through the Arts." I'm sharing the paper here because the book was interesting, I'm open to other folks' interpretations, it's fun, and I like sharing writing. I can probably come up [...]

The weather is absolutely gorgeous today! I am so pleased to have sunshine and warmth now, instead of constantly gray and rainy days. Consequently, here are some more quietly happy random thoughts… of no particular seriousness or order. :) ———- My hair is growing longer! When I let it down, the longest ends now brush [...]

I just finished listening to an utterly fascinating interview on a blogradio with a man named Allan Johnson. I'm very interested in hearing what others think of it as well. Rarely have I heard a man with such patience and empathy so clear in his very voice, let alone his words; he actually had me [...]

It is the first day of my Spring Break as I write this — wheeeee! Of course, being the Wild Child I am, I'll likely happily spend it curled up on the couch with my textbooks and laptop, working on midterms in front of a crackling fire as I sip a mug of hot tea [...]

Wowzers. This has been an extremely momentous holiday season for my household and myself. I'm very excited at successfully registering for my first quarter of classes for the PhD — both on-line and face-to-face classes, it looks like. I've not done on-line classes before; nifty! I'm being careful for the first quarter and not taking [...]

In effect, those two verses were where the author wrote Truth as she knew it, and that's why those verses shone. Unfortunately, since we've not yet seen the end of this conflict, and she had to describe that 'victory' metaphorically, she couldn't write a truth for that — it hasn't happened yet. Here's the second [...]