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Reading Surah 19: A rock-splitting, sky-bursting adventure

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  Let’s read part of the Quran! TWO DISCLAIMERS: I think it’s impossible to read a religious text without bias because they typically cover very personal things. In this case, I think it’s smarter to use bias to my advantage, and use what I believe as a stepping stool up to an interesting perspective on what many Muslims believe.  The orthodox Islamic belief states that to get the full grasp of the Quran you must read it’s poetry in the original Arabic. I’m not doing that as I don’t know Arabic, so I’m reading a translation. Grain of salt, I guess? I think it’s really cool and wise to read things like the Quran, even if I have been conditioned to not believe it. I have found that it’s a strange book; on one hand it references the Bible multiple times, and expects readers to have some knowledge of the Bible. On the other hand, it adds bits of canon or “lore” onto these commonly heard biblical stories that weren’t in the initial biblical canon. The Quran was written roughly 500 years aft
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Martyrs, maniacs, malts, and mosaics

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                 "We're brothers in Christ with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and are looking to find out where he was hidden". This is what I typed into my English-> German translator app in hopes that it could unlock a few doors for us.            Last week, my brother and one of my best friends, Matt, were staying at an AirB&B in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a skiing town in the German alps. We had one day left to spend in the beautiful region and no plan of what to do with it. I'd heard a couple times about this cool old monastery that was nestled in a valley 20 minutes away in the alpine village of Ettal. I thought it could be a cool thing to check out, but wasn't too motivated to go see it. I had done a 10 hour hike the day before, had a big breakfast, and was too busy enjoying gawking at the nearly 10,000 foot peaks around us to see another silent, ornate Roman Catholic building on top of the dozens we'd seen. Besides, it was only 700 years old, which is young
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Coming clean: addictions, doctors, and John Mulaney

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       “It’s weird to be a recovering drug addict. It was weird to be a drug addict, but at least I was on drugs.*Laughter* It’s strange sometimes, you know, like I’m doing great. But when I’m alone, I’m with the person that tried to kill me. Sometimes I walk past a mirror, I’m like, “This f*cking guy again.” That is kind of a creepy feeling sometimes. But it’s also a nice feeling. It gives me a strange kind of confidence sometimes, because, like, look, I… I used to care what everyone thought about me… so much. It was all I cared about. All I cared about was what other people thought of me. And I don’t anymore. And I don’t because I can honestly say, what is someone going to do to me that’s worse than what I would do to myself? What are you going to do, cancel John Mulaney? I’ll kill him.” *Laughter* When I heard that my favorite comedian, John Mulaney, was in a serious bout of rehab for cocaine addiction, I was disappointed. That probably meant no John Mulaney Netflix specials for
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Getting out of the boat part 1

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 Me and the boys haulin' it in on a Tuesday afternoon      So here I am, and I’ve picked up a piece of Luke that I haven’t paid attention to in the past, and I am going to try and cohesively share a few thoughts on it. It’s where Jesus calls the disciple Peter and some of his mates, where Luke’s account of this interaction is a lot more detailed than Matthew or Mark’s on how exactly Jesus does it. Before we start, John’s account of Jesus’s first interactions with Peter(John 1:42) give us a context clue that by this passage of Luke(Chapter 5 vv. 1-11), Jesus has likely already had a few interactions with the disciples he’s about to call, if not befriended them or at least made their acquaintances. Okay, so, here we are, Luke 5:1-11: On one occasion, while the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret, 2 and he saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. 3 Getting into one o
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Location: Rabbi Meir Grave, Tiberias, Israel
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