All The Light We Can See

God Said; We Say

stanciu August 3, 2020 No Comments

On December 24, 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 read in turn from the Book of Genesis as they orbited the Moon. William Anders read, “And God said, ‘Let there be light: and there was light,’” probably for Christians the most well-known passage from the Hebrew Bible, and one of the most ambiguous ideas in theology. At the time of the flyby of Apollo 8, I was an atheist; that God merely spoke and light appeared made no sense to me; that later His Speech brought into existence, the stars, the Earth, plants, fish, birds, and

Why Christianity in America Is Subservient to Capitalism

stanciu July 13, 2020 4 Comments

The Covid-19 Pandemic has revealed that we no longer have the equivalent of such moral leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., Caesar Chavez, and Dorothy Day. These leaders in their actions embodied the Gospel of Love and the unshakeable Christian understanding of the human being taken from the Book of Genesis: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”[1] Every Christian denomination holds that in some way God, or Christ, is in each person and consequently possesses a dignity that

Trouble in Paradise

stanciu June 28, 2020 No Comments

Has Deep Gloom Killed the Future? Before the Covid-19 Experiment focused our attention on not dying prematurely, most of us were enveloped in deep gloom, whose sources are still present. The two major political factions, the Left and the Right, promulgate apocalyptic images of the future that portray that we are fearfully close to a final descent into darkness; The human species is threatened by climate change; Kim Jong-un and Donald J. Trump can initiate nuclear war with the push of a button; the United States, China, and Russia are divvying up the

Donald I, Act IV

stanciu June 14, 2020 No Comments

Events from Act III The Covid-19 pandemic reached the United States in January 2020, and by the end of May, 100,000 people had died. Social distancing, mandated in March, shut down the economy, leading to 40 million unemployed. On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a black man, died in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from a white officer with the Minneapolis Police Department, pressing his knee to Floyd’s neck for nine minutes, while Floyd was handcuffed face down on the ground. Peaceful protests against police brutality that sometimes turned violent spread from Minneapolis to numerous American cities and even to Toronto, London, and Berlin.

Loneliness: Another Epidemic

stanciu May 18, 2020 4 Comments

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed structural deficiencies of American capitalism: corporations run solely for the benefit of CEOs and investors; workers without paid leave; a healthcare system with inadequate personal protection equipment for MDs and nurses. Social distancing to reduce the number of Covid-19 cases exposed that individualism caused a different epidemic — loneliness. The 2000 U.S. census uncovered that one out of every four households consists of only one person. Roughly twenty percent of Americans feel so isolated from others that loneliness is a major source of unhappiness in their lives,[1] irrespective

The Covid-19 Pandemic: Surrounded by a Sea of Death

stanciu May 4, 2020 No Comments

The Covid-19 Experiment exposes our deepest fears. Most of us are confined to home and would find reality unbearable without Netflix, Amazon Music, Minecraft, and YouTube. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, we Americans blinded ourselves to illness, aging, and dying. The critically ill were moved to intensive care units, where they were hidden beneath cables and tubes connected to monitors and respirators; the old and infirm with cognitive problems were housed in memory-care facilities and were often confined to a single room with a flat-screen TV and artificial flowers; the dying spent their last

The Covid-19 Pandemic: Chance and Necessity

stanciu April 20, 2020 No Comments

I had thought myself lost, had touched the very bottom of despair; and then, when the spirit of renunciation had filled me, I had known peace. . . . In such an hour, a man feels he has finally found himself.

The Covid-19 Experiment: Good Books, Not Distractions

stanciu April 3, 2020 3 Comments

To combat the aimlessness, boredom, and depression induced by The Covid-19 Experiment, the New York Times ran a series on the best movies, TV series, and video games to cure their readers of the social-distancing blues. Over half America is distracted, watching the seven episodes of Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness and other streaming videos on Netflix, not considering that the currently forced solitude is an opportunity for meditation and reflection upon life and death. All the good books listed below are from the responses to the unscientific questionnaire that I recently

Lies and Truths about Who We Are

stanciu March 31, 2020 No Comments

The most important question a person can ask is the philosophical question, “Who am I?”, because without knowing who we truly are, we will not be sure that what we seek is good for us and what we try to avoid is bad. The unexamined answer given to the philosophical question determines to a large extent our concrete daily existence. Consider Charles Wright, a good friend of mine in graduate school. After he received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics, he accepted a job at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown

The Covid-19 Experiment and Stupid Ideas

stanciu March 20, 2020 No Comments

I went to the agora at seven o’clock this morning. Not counting me, six customers were in the supermarket. All of us stayed more than six feet apart; the checkout woman wore heavy, black rubber gloves; three customers wore masks and gloves. Everyone feared contracting the covid-19 virus and dying. Death has always been a pest perched on our right shoulders. Before the covid-19 virus, 7,452 people died every day in the United States and approximately 150,000 worldwide. The first principle of Buddhism — nothing is permanent in this world — is undeniable.

Comfort Food

stanciu March 18, 2020 No Comments

We moderns live in our heads. As a child, I watched my father, a Romanian peasant, drink hot tea with rum from an old-fashioned diner cup. I was fascinated by how my father’s fingers thick from hard work wrapped around the heavy cup with the handle opposite his hand. The cup and fingers formed a whole. My father lived in the world, not in his head with a running commentary on everything, and that is the reason excellent food was an essential part of his life, and by living with him part of

The Scary Covid-19 Experiment

stanciu March 16, 2020 2 Comments

We are now participants in a gigantic experiment: What happens in modern society when social interactions are reduced to a minimum? Already my favorite coffee shop here in Santa Fe is on the verge of going out of business. Most small businesses cannot stand an economic hit for long; fixed expenses kill them. I just returned from my locally owned grocery store; the store was empty as were the shelves. Virtually all schools, colleges, and universities, centers for breeding flu, are closed. Small liberal arts colleges, economically stressed for a decade, are no

All the Light We Can See

stanciu February 17, 2020 No Comments

All the Light We Can See I live in Northern New Mexico, where at sunset, a golden light envelops the high desert; the adobe buildings glow with the richness of polished gold and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains with the deep red of blood. The extraordinary light, the sparseness of the high desert, and the clarity of the air have drawn thousands of painters and photographers to Taos and Santa Fe. Every summer, my children and grandchildren, after a dinner of barbecued ribs and coleslaw, or Romanian chicken stew with tarragon and sour

Blue Sky and Hope

stanciu February 17, 2020 No Comments

J.P., the main character of Raymond Carver’s short story “Where I Am Calling From,” when a young boy fell down a dry well. Trapped at the bottom of the well with pebbles and dirt falling on him, isolated from the world, he feared he would never be rescued. He yelled and yelled for his father and wet his pants. But the circle of blue sky above him gave him hope; an occasional cloud drifted by, and now and then a bird flew overhead. The hope that sustained him as a boy in the