A Destabilizing Parable of Artificial Sentience — Tamika felt heavier than the mahogany table where twelve disciplinary panel members sat waiting for the hearing to begin. They needed her to testify against Haoyu, her good friend who had long wanted to be more than just a friend. Under oath, she had to damn him or perjure herself…

Complexities of the Heart — You don’t look at the faces of people driving full speed on a highway. They don’t look at you either. That’s why, every so often, you pick your nose. Alas, a habit is a habit. When you were thinking about your shopping list, your index finger flirted with your left…

A Shortwise Spiritual Poem —

And our shadows — Saying Grace… Sophia Auld barged into my life from the nineteenth century. Her ghost crept out of an old book. As a sentient being, she is part of my broadest WE. So are you. I take us seriously. We are the opposite of lonely despair. There is no hope without us. If…

How to Talk to a Coward — Conventional wisdom — the Greek chorus of American tragedy — is leaning away from civil war. Hyperbole. Sensationalism. The rants of fringe people. The chorus is wrong. Suppose you have three Trump enthusiasts among your friends. In that case, it is statistically impossible (by the standards of Peter Navarro) for…

Do You Wish You Were Here? — So you think you can tell Heaven from Hell?— Pink Floyd I’ll offer four accounts of an event from this morning (March 16, 2023). The first is physical, the second psychological, and the third historical. The fourth, the spiritual, contains the best data. Three Non-Spiritual Accounts First, here’s what an objective observer could…

How Do the Most Spiritual People Behave? — I’m writing from a progressive Christian viewpoint. What Jesus would do is what Jesus did. He provoked respectable people to torture him to death and told us to do likewise (Luke 9:23). How close have you come to that ideal? I’m not doing so well at it. If Jesus stood…

How I Got That Nickname — Bill, my long-haired roommate, sat on the other side of a cheap, rickety coffee table in our single-wide trailer. He was a poet, a big fan of Ezra Pound. We were sophomores at Clarion State College. His hangover didn’t keep him from focusing with a steady gaze while over-pronouncing every…

Submissions Should be Three Minutes Long and Spiritual with at Least a Touch of Whimsy — The subtitle says it all. Details follow. Three minutes is the inflexible limit. Otherwise the name of the publication would change. The editor enforces this rule even on himself. Spiritual is whatever you honestly think it means. To me, spiritual topics are deeply meaningful and touch on topics of eternal…