Articles

“It’s complicated!” No, it’s not a Facebook update about a relationship that’s heading south. It was a “nutshell” commentary on how difficult it is to understand the brain, from neuroscience professor Henry Markram, addressing a Brussels conference on European Brain Research.

Many years ago, I was newly married, with a baby on the way, and my husband was in the military, stationed in Iceland for a year. He wasn’t scheduled to come home until the baby would be nine months old.

When our Christian Science chaplain left the interfaith body at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island about nine years ago, my church wanted me to step in. I was happy to accept, since I’d served in another interfaith group.

On the last night at summer camp many years ago, a ceremony included an award for whoever could build a campfire with just one match. In order to do so, we had to learn the principles of fire building—for instance, the need for oxygen and for something dry that burns readily.

The Christmas season is here. Voices harmonize in song to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ centuries ago.

Picture a river channel snaking through a deep canyon. Or the wide English Channel between England and France.

On a recent morning I found myself thinking, “I am in God’s care. He is taking such good care of me.

Mary Baker Eddy mentions the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid three times in her published works. And Abraham Lincoln, as a horseback lawyer in rural Illinois, carried a copy of Euclid’s book The Elements in his saddlebag.

When I was a child and a teenager, I struggled a lot to figure out who I was and where I fit in. I looked at the other kids at school and tried to copy them, the clothes they wore and the music they listened to, but that didn’t help me find myself.

Not long ago, a friend of mine said to me, “I’m really struggling with the need to give up what’s good in life in order to be more spiritual. I’ve built a successful business.