Getting out of the boat

             The last time you were in a plane, did you get any turbulence? Probably a little. If you're reading this, it means it thankfully didn't get too bad. Imagine it did. Imagine it got horrible . Imagine the plane crew was panicking, one of them was unconscious, and the 60-year-old smoker next to you vomited all over your pants. You look outside, and everything is black. Occasionally a lightning strike illuminates the terrifying maelstrom outside the plane, with it's 30,000 feet drops and mountain sized cumulonimbus clouds.     Then, imagine, with one flash of lightning, you see a human silhouette far in the distance. You'd probably think someone just fell out of the plane. But then, another bolt flashes, and you see this person again and they're getting closer. And closer, and closer to the wing. And they're flying.      Even as I wrote that example, I still don't think I can replicate the terr...

What can we get from our favorite art? Movies are cool. You can use them to escape, relax, and challenge yourself. Well crafted films are often cool, inspiring, impressive, and, you might hate the word, “vibey”.  Movies can serve a lot of functions. Some movies exist only to entertain at a very basic level(Ex. Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire (2024)). Some movies exist to be purely artistic expressions of the director with little entertainment value(ex. Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky(1979)). Some films seek to entertain by creating an intensely escapist world or by having a hyper stylized composition(See Star Wars or a ny Quentin Tarantino film ).  Many movies, the movies that are typically most peoples’ favorites, blend entertainment and directorial vision and some amount of thematic meaning all together. Generally this leads to our most widespread and beloved films - See The Return of The King (2003) , The Dark Knight (2008) , or Jurassic Park (1993). Some of my very favorit...

  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 ...

                 "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...