View from Hotel

The view from my hotel window. The foreground shows a modernized shopping area. Behind that and to the right is the old town and you see an old church. To the left in the background are old Soviet Communist era buildings undergoing repair. That summarizes Vilnius. It is a mixture of all three. They revere their cultural heritage and have preserved it well in their old town. Their is a lot of building going on. They seem to have made a fast transition to a market economy and appear to be a nation on the move.

Here in Vilnius

It is 7:30 am here in my hotel and the lobby computer is available. This place is an amazing mixture of the old, modern, and postmodern. From my hotel room I can view the "old town" section of Vilnius with its small streets and many old churches. Some of the vista from my room reveals buildings and architecture from the Soviet era. But, I can also view several shopping centers and new postmodern buildings which show that since being the first of the countries to break away from the Soviet Union in about 1990 Lithuania is open for business. It is meaningful that I can from here see the TV tower where about 13 people gave their lives to the cause of freedom in that year.

Yesterday I visited the Laser Research Center of Vilnius University. They have spun off several laser businesses from that department. They lead the world in certain aspects of Femtosecond Laser technology. I was impressed learn of their new Yb doped Lithium Niobate based laser that promises to allow these types of lasers to be much smaller. The world will be a better place when we can get smaller and cheaper femtosecond lasers.

Famous Lithuanians

The scholar Maria Gimbutas was from Lithuania.

Vilna Gaon was a famous rabbi of the 18 th century in Vilnius.

The Three Stooges' dad was from Kaunas and their mom was from Vilnius.

Other Americans of Lithuanian Heritage: Charles Bronson, Monica Lewinsky, Al Jolson.

Map of Lithuania

Lithuania - Looking Forward to the Journey

Never dreamed I'd have a the opportunity to travel to Lithuania. On Friday I'm scheduled to travel to a NATO workshop in Vilnius, Lithuania.

The Lithuanian language is the language which is most like the original Indo-European tongue from which most European languages have descended. This includes the Romance, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, Indo-Aryan language groups as well as a number of extinct ones like Hittite and Tocharian. Lithuanian along with Latvian and an extinct Prussian belong to the Baltic group. You might be surprized to learn that Lithuanian preserves a complexity similar to its cousin, Sanskrit, you know, the tongue in which so many Indian scriptures are preserved.

Depth of the Universe

From the Book of Thomas the Contender, an uneven, ascetic, definitely gnostic text from the Nag Hammadi library. (note: this is not the Gospel of Thomas)

The Saviour said, "Brother Thomas, while you still have time in the world, listen to me and I shall explain what you have been reflecting upon in your mind. Since it is said that you are my twin and my true friend, examine yourself and understand who you are, how you live, and what will become of you. Since you are called my brother, you should not be ignorant about yoursef. I know you understand some things, for already you understand that I am the knowledge of truth. While you are walking with me, though you are ignorant of other things, already you have obtained knowledge and you will be described as one who knows self. For whoever does not know self does not know anything, but whoever knows self already has acquired knowledge about the depth of the universe."

What strikes me here, and it may even be an accident of words used to translate, is that we must know ourselves in order to understand our universe. We cannot know the physical world alone and truly have knowledge about the depths of the universe.

This was called to mind as I was reading some marvelous posts by Richard Beck over at Experimental Theology.

Spiritual Meaning of our Animal Friends Part 2

"There is a profound, inescapable need for animals that is in all people everywhere, an urge for which no substitute exists."

"... animals are used in the growth and development of the human person."

"...animals have critical role in shaping personal identity and social consciousness."

" basic to the development of speech and thought"

" indispensible to our becoming human in the fullest sense"

"By identifying with a number of animals in turn, the child discovers a common ground with other beings..." .. "By pretending that animals speak to one another, he imposes on them a pseudo-humanity which ... is the glue of real kinship."

From the article by Paul Shepard "The Ark of the Mind" p54 of Parabola VIII #2, 1983.


I thought these quotes were interesting.

Tradition - What Good is It?

Hermit Greg made this marvelous quote in a discussion about the issue of using powerpoint in worship.

Not to know tradition is to be trapped in it, to be used by it, never to discover that it holds no knowledge of the ineffable God in itself. Tradition cannot be stepped outside of, but its workings can be learned, its gears and levers pried loose. The goal of becoming grounded in tradition is to learn to drive it so that it doesn’t drive us. To say as much is to show my Protestant colors, I know, and I also know it is to do so at the expense of my Restoration flag. So be it.


(Also see J. Wiser's blog post Laborious Powerpointus)

The Spiritual Meaning of Our Animal Friends

For some time recently I have been contemplating the relation between humans and animals.

Why do we humans have a deep need for and feel a special closeness to animals? I feel this somewhat. But others close to me feel this to a much greater degree. I want to understand this.

Animals are critical to the spiritual formation of our children.

How do we communicate with children age 2 to 4? Isn't it true that we communicate with them by picture and stories of animals? Think of books written for that age group. Ones you've no doubt read many times - if you have children. We use animals to teach them and nurture them into being human.

What do we teach? We teach friendship and communicate certain other truths.

Don't we consider ourselves blessed in some way/aren't we excited/ aren't we enchanted when we have a chance encounter with a deer? A bald eagle? Or even a rabbit? We are transported or interrupted. Our consciousness is altered. We go to another place.

And sometimes, these moments seem more special to us if we have children along. We are so excited that we want them to experience this as well.

These thoughts derive from an article in Parabola: The Search for Meaning Vol 31 No. 2 Issue Theme: Absence and Longing Summer 2006. The particular article is Loneliness and Presence by Thomas Berry, p 80.

(The photo is our new dog we received a couple of months ago from a rescue facility which is closing. Tweetie has very low self esteem. She is very scared of me.)

We are now empty nesters

Yesterday was our first day with both our sons gone. So we are now empty nesters. We knew our younger son was headed to Nashville for his freshman year at Lipscomb. Our older son who had stayed in town afther high school decided rather recently to transfer to the U. of Memphis. So there are big changes in our lives. The other big change in our lives is that we are part of a new church. So I've been looking to the future quite a bit recently. Its time to get out of the old ruts and into some new ones. From Amazon this week I received "The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st Century Church". There is a quote appropriate to my life changes in the front by Hans Kung.

A church which pitches its tents without constantly looking out for new horizons, which does not continually strike camp, is being untrue to its calling... [We must] play down our longing for certainty, accept what is risky, live by improvisation and experiment.

At TVA's Buffalo Wind Farm

I trekked to TVA's Buffalo Wind Farm in Oliver Springs, TN a couple of weeks ago. These wind mills are tall and stately. They make a pleasant "Swoosh" sound. They are majestic.

Ground Source Heat Pumps

I've been reading lately about Ground Source Heat Pumps. When I bought our present house 16 years ago I accepted whatever systems the builder had installed. The next time, I'm saving energy and dollars with one of these systems. I would convert my present HVAC but we don't plan to be here but for 2 or 3 more years in this home.

Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: Pt 3

The last chapter is "Metaphysical Holism and Divine Action". She begins with a nod to a 20th century philosopher by the name of Roy Wood Sellars. Sellars described the universe and its evolution as involving the march of ascending levels with the emergence of new properties at each level. He rejected "reductive materialism," the view that all of reality can be, in principle, reduced to the motion of atoms moving about and completely described and limited to physics calculations. Reality is thus reduced to the impersonal. All that we feel is reduced to and determined by the laws of how atoms bump and clump together. That is determinism and it dominated the Anglo-American philosophical world of the mid-twentieth century in which I grew up. He contended that there was too much emphasis on stuff and not enough on how things were organized. There are different causes and relationships and characteristics that apply to a succession of reality's levels. The levels that Sellars countenances are the inorganic, the organic, the mental or conscious, the social, the ethical, and the spiritual(1). He is a proponent of an idea known as emergence(2).

From here philosophers, biologists, physicists, and even new age authors (3) have proceeded to develop the nature of and implications of emergence.

With each step upward in the heirarchy of biological order, novel properties emerge that were not present at the simpler levels of organization. These emergent properties result from interactions between components. A molecule such as a protein has attributes not exhibited by any of its component atoms, and a cell is certainly much more than a bag of molecules(4).

From here Murphy proceeds to discuss the concept of supervenience. This concept, introduced in the seventies, refers to how action on a higher level specifies or controls activity on a lower level. For instance, in a biological cell it is the dynamic activities and processes in the cell that control the chemical reactions and positions of the individual molecules and cells. By analogy we can move up the ladder to higher and higher levels. For example, mental processes control or supervene the physical and electrical properties in a person's brain.

Nancy then makes the extrapolation then that if the highest level is God, then God supervenes the physical world. This allows natural laws to be in place and still functioning at all times and yet God, through supervenience, can act in the real world.

It is just a suggestion. She does not flesh the details out but suggests that this may have the potential to change the current polarization of religious dialogue. There is much work to be done.

Here, ten years since she wrote, religious thought, at least for most of the public, can still yet be easily be divided between two extremes, liberalism and fundamentalism. She hopes that the concept of emergence and postmodern philosophy and theories of language will allow thoughtful positions along a spectrum of these two extremes.

1. N. Murphy Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism, p 137, Trinity Press, Harrisburg, PA. 1996.

2. Wikipedia traces the idea of emergence to John Stuart Mill. See emergence.

3. Ken Wilber talks about this in his The Marriage of Sense and Soul. This book traces the idea of the hierachical view of reality back in to ancient wisdom sources.

2. ibid 139 (quoted from Neil A. Campbell, Biology, 2nd ed. (Redwood City: Benjamin/Cummins, 1990) ...Amazon has info on the 7th edition here.

Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism Pt2: Epistemological Holism

From chapter four of Murphy's book, I'm learning about epistemological holism. Rather than our knowledge being based upon a foundation of direct common sense experience and propositions that build on that, a postmodern view is that there is a web of beliefs which connect to each other in various ways. Coherence is an important concept here. How these beliefs fit together must be coherent. When a report of a new observation occurs, it is attached to the web in a way that least disturbs a person's web of belief. Let me give an example I've been thinking about lately. For instance, let us suppose a new piece of data ostensibly supporting climate change is reported. How does a climate change skeptic deal with that? By a variety of strategies including questioning the data, questioning the motives of the publisher, adjusting previous beliefs to make the new data fit, conjuring up another mechanism for the specific item reported, etc. At some point such a skeptic might realize that their belief system can no longer be made to coherently fit all the data and experience. When it is realized that a new adhoc hypothesis must be contrived in order to accomodate each new piece of information, then it is time to change.

Now on to the remaining chapters.

Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism

Am reading Nancey Murphey's Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda.

I am part way through it. I think she adequately describes how "the predominant materialist, atomist, reductionist, assumptions" that led to science were taken to extreme by both the fundamentalist as well as the materialist mind set, producing fundamentalism and liberalism. A third way is emerging. Am looking forward to its description in chapter 6 which "surveys changes in understandings of science that have deep metaphysical implications and thus consequences for an account of divine action as well." (p86)