Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

Doctor King wasn't the first one to say it. He heard it from a young woman named Prathia Hall , who used "I have a dream" several times in the opening prayer of a service commemorating a church that had been burned down by the KKK. Preachers often borrow from each other (just like writers, I should mention), and Doctor King borrowed it from her. I didn't know that before yesterday. I heard it from the Rev. Traci Blackmon , who was our guest preacher for Martin Luther King Sunday. This is our second MLK Sunday with our new Rector, and I've got to say he brings in some pretty amazing guests. Last year's had a profound effect on me, too. (Yes, you can see me in the background. My seat in the choir always puts me in the sight-line of the live stream camera.) Rev. Blackmon's sermon was titled, " Where are the Dreamers? " and she pointed out that "Prophetic resistance is only possible for those who can still dream." It's ...

I discovered this past weekend that 2018 is the Madeleine L'Engle Centennial. What would have been her 100th birthday comes at the end of November. The first of what will probably be a number of podcasts about her life and her writing came out last month, when Marketplace's "Make Me Smart" read A Wrinkle in Time for their Book Club and interviewed one of her two granddaughters who collaborated on a new biography that's coming out. Give it a listen if you're so inclined. There are many different themes in A Wrinkle in Time , but one they discussed at length in the podcast was new to me - the idea of Meg having to be her own rescuer. Meg's father is missing when the story begins, and she's told he's been fighting a sinister dark force that threatens to consume all of creation. They go off in search of him, and at that point we think, "Once they find him, he'll be able to save the day." Only he can't. Meg has to do it i...

I've been doing my best to avoid watching news since last November. I'm mostly successful, but that darn twosome of Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell are hard to resist. But even that is too much. Just like their counterparts at FOX News, they keep their ratings up by appealing to the revulsion people feel for the other side and the hope that their side is on the verge of turning the tables. The fact that they use real news stories to do it instead of making stuff up doesn't change the overall approach. That's just the business model. But this week, any faint hopes I had that the Trump Russia story would have a meaningful effect pretty much evaporated. Republicans have found a way to pin the "real Russia scandal" on Hillary Clinton, and that's all they'll need to shut down the Congressional investigations, and perhaps the Special Counsel's office as well. Robert Mueller may yet be able to get some people prosecuted on state charges ...

You don't have to watch anime for very long to notice some things about Japanese culture that are very different from the West. It's one of the things that draws me to it, actually, and one major difference I find fascinating is the completely different spiritual world. Shinto is an "animist" religion, where everything has a kami , a "god" or spirit, roughly equivalent - by my reckoning - to a patron saint. But what struck me as particularly different from what I'm used to is the notion, presented in more than one show, that the kami depend on having believers. Ones with many believers or worshippers are big and powerful. Ones with few are small and weak, and even in danger of disappearing. Thus the kami are inclined to grant their believers' wishes, so as to keep them believing. Now, I know better than to judge an entire religion based on a few anime episodes. I'm sure they've misrepresented some things (you should see how Christi...