March 19, 2016 at 2:21 pm
On Friday evening, I had the pleasure to attend an evening service at BU Hillel. This service was part of Interfaith shabbat, an event where people of any faith or spiritual background were invited to take part in a Reform service, share a meal, and attend a discussion about the relationship between faith and the […]
February 26, 2016 at 11:29 pm
In one of my classes, we were assigned to read Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In this book, Durkheim explains how religion could have emerged in society, with a broader goal to understand how it is part of the human experience. That goal sounds rather ambitious, as did the prospect of reading the […]
February 14, 2016 at 8:50 pm
As I write this weekly blog post, I am especially conscious of today’s date: February 14th. I was aware of it in my blog post last year, too. I had just come back from an interfaith conference at Yale with two friends. We had barely returned to Boston by train when a snowstorm paralyzed Boston’s subway system […]
February 6, 2016 at 1:05 am
In our Marsh Associates meeting on Monday, I was asked to write down and share a few things about what praying meant to me, along with my fellow Marsh Associates. As we went around and shared what prayer was for us, the variety of practices struck me greatly. One person prayed in singing, in holding hands in […]
January 30, 2016 at 8:23 pm
One of my professors once told me a saying: “You can do seven days’ worth of work in six days, but you can’t do it in seven.” I was a freshman then, and at the time his words didn’t make much sense to me. How can you do more days’ work in less time? As efficient […]
December 9, 2015 at 5:15 pm
I began this semester with a reflection on what loving oneself meant, tying it to the myth of Narcissus and a metaphor a friend once told me. That reflection ended with an intention to redefine this principle for myself, and to apply it to my relationships with those around me. That was in mid-September. It’s […]
December 3, 2015 at 7:11 am
In a small group that I attend every few weeks, we’ve been learning about John Wesley’s General Rules of Methodism. The first of these rules is to do no harm. Wesley defines this rule by listing several practices that should be avoided. Some of them seem intuitive, such as “Doing to others as we would not […]
November 19, 2015 at 12:22 pm
When I came to Marsh Chapel during my freshman year, I quickly became known for being the person who was always cleaning up after community dinner. It didn’t matter how many dishes were involved, nor the amount of effort needed to clean everything. At some point during the meal I would get up, head over […]
November 11, 2015 at 10:56 pm
During our weekly Marsh Associates meeting on Monday evening, Soren asked us to try an exercise. We took a field trip to the law school building and went to the Law School Cafe. Our assignment, on the surface, was simple: find a place to sit down, observe someone for ten minutes, and see what we could […]
November 4, 2015 at 10:26 pm
Death has been a recurring theme over the past week. On the one hand, Halloween surrounded us with constant reminders of it: you didn’t have to look very far to find skeletons, ghosts, and grim reapers wandering about the streets. These may be costumes, but they certainly resonate with the origins of Halloween, Samhain. This Gaelic festival marks the day […]