Seeking Wisdom

What does it mean to talk to someone? To be painfully analytical: My brain sends impulses to mouth, lips, and tongue to coordinate with my diaphragm and conjure a complex mixture of fricative and non-fricative sounds at a volume loud enough to be audible so that somebody else’s ears can perceive that pressure wave through a mechanism that’s far too complicated for me to understand or explain, ultimately sending an electrical signal to their brain with some message that I did or did not intend. That gets interpreted and so on. Cartesian Dualism bookends this process with two souls that possess wills that manipulate those brains and so on down the line. So what we really mean when we say we’re talking to someone is that we’re making noise with our body (probably, hopefully, meaningful) and that other person’s body has the machinery to decode that meaningful noise, if we speak the same language. Who’s the “we” here? Is it that thing Descartes would call a soul, or the bodies ...

Ephesians 5:18 – “And do not get drunk on wine, in which lies debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit.” Surely this is an injunction against going farther with a girl than you would have had you been sober. Surely this is an injunction against getting too drunk at a family party and cussing loudly in front of your young cousins. And this is most certainly an order to stop the behavior that leads you to be passed out on a riverbank, too drunk to stand even after you’ve puked five times, so that your friend has to carry you to the nearest road, where you get picked up by a guy in a pickup truck who won’t let you sit in the cab so you lay in the bed like roadkill.               Then he says that you should spend “a little more time reading the good book and a little less with the fourteen extra,” whatever that means. Talk about providing witness.            ...

One of the things I’ve observed here in Ethiopia that I love about their culture is the prevalence of physical affection. Shaking hands is not just for introductions, nearly every time you see someone you make physical contact with them. A person you know is never just something you see, you feel them every time you interact. Men who are closer will shake hands then lean in and bump their shoulders together. It looks a little strange at first, but it’s so much more affectionate than a handshake. Partly because it takes longer, partly because you can shake someone’s hand with your faces four feet apart, but you brush ears if you’re bumping shoulders. When men are walking together they are hanging all over each other. Holding hands, an arm around a shoulder, one holding another’s wrist. It’s a bit shocking to see at first, especially coming from America, the no-touch zone. It’s been refreshing for me seeing this culture, as I’ve always been touchy. My mom would say that my pr...