thought exercise on Space

‘Space’ means an area of freedom, without coercion or accountability, free of pressures and void of authority. Space may be imagined as week-end, holiday, a vacation, and is characterised by a kind of...

A worldview is as indispensable for thinking as an atmosphere is for breathing. You can’t think in an intellectual vacuum any more than you can breathe without a physical atmosphere. Most of the time,...

Colonel William Pogue requested a day of rest from mission control for his overworked and exhausted space crew: “We have been over-scheduled. We were just hustling the whole day. The work could be tir...

Frustration is something that does not exist—except within the self. It translates my world to me through the filter of my own need to control it. Frustration becomes the space we put between ourselve...

Astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson taught me why space is dark. Why does our sun not light up space? The answer is fairly simple: light needs something to reflect off of. Sunlight from our sun and oth...

A little more than a year ago, three men were orbiting the moon in a space capsule. It was Christmas Eve, and they took turns reading Genesis 1, the opening chapter of the Bible: “In the beginning God...

[D]o you have margin in your life, like the white spaces between these words and the edges of the page? Having margin is about intentionally scheduling white space in your calendar to pray, rest, read...

Never in history has distance meant less. . . . Figuratively we “use up” places and dispose of them much in the same way we dispose of Kleenex or beer cans. We are witnessing a historic decline in the...

In I’d Like You More If You Were More Like Me , John Ortberg uses an interesting analogy for an aspect of our relationships. In 2015, Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner announced the Starshot Initiati...

In 1961 the Russians put the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin. Nikita Khrushchev was the Russian premier, and he said that when Gagarin went into space, the cosmonaut discovered that there was no Go...

Every creator, from a child with Play-Doh to Michelangelo, learns that creation involves a kind of self-limiting. You produce something that did not exist before, yes, but only by ruling out other opt...

Until recently, most Americans didn’t know that women were pivotal to the NASA space program as far back as the 1950s. Their names and accomplishments were lost to the common history we grew up studyi...

Many of us westerners are familiar with the stories of the first Apollo missions and the “space race” with Russia. What we are less familiar with is the experience from the other side, from the Russia...

In the desert outside of Tucson, scientists dreamed up an experiment to re-create the conditions of earth for space, when and if the earth could not be made great again. The biosphere was a little wor...

A TV reporter became interested in the Apollo trips to the moon—what did they talk about? He was surprised to find how much conversation was devoted to course corrections. Apparently, the lunar spacec...

Neil Armstrong, the great astronaut, once took a trip to the Old City of Jerusalem. He went to the Hulda Gate, which opens to the Temple Mount. Armstrong asked a guide whether Jesus had in fact walked...

Presence is experienced as a unitary whole. Think, for example, about the experience of sitting on the top of a hill, far from the polluting lights of a city, gazing at a dark, starry sky. Unless you ...

Have you ever felt like some people take longer to leave a parking spot when you are waiting for them? Well, apparently you are not just imagining it…Three separate studies have demonstrated that this...

The world is full of presence. Every moment of life is crammed full of potential encounters with people and things that are present to us even though we may not be present to them: the presence of a c...

In this short excerpt, pastor and author Austin Fischer summarizes the late 19th century book Flatland as an analogy for the often-one-dimensional faith that exists our time: tIn 1884, an English sc...

The fascination with silence took root early in the life of composer John Cage. In 1928, during a speech contest at Los Angeles High School, he argued for the establishment of a national day of quiet....

Find the room where your family spends the most time and ruthlessly eliminate the things that ask little of you and develop little in you. Move the TV to a less central location—and ideally a less com...

The animated movie WALL-E is a cute story of a curious robot whose job is to clean up a trashed earth. While humans once inhabited the earth, we soon discover they have been evacuated from earth with ...

“The reason I am a minimalist today,” Troy began, “is because of the color of my house.” I’d never heard that one before, so I asked Troy to explain what he meant. Troy was a tall man of about forty w...

In June 2024, I (A. J.) had the opportunity to visit the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem, Oregon, to meet with a group of inmates who had read one of my recent books. The experience was...

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart,” said the apostle Paul, “as working for the Lord, not for human masters.” (Colossians 3:23) ...[H]ow you do anything is how you’ll do everything. Dr. ...

Rituals are procedures or routines that are fused with meaning. Ritual actions include various rites of passage (birth, marriage, death) or calendrical rites (religious holy days, national holidays), ...

Let me share one more lesson I am learning about daily surrender. It concerns the way we relate to others. Daily we encounter people who express views opposite to our own, hold values with which we ca...

Many have heard of the polymath and famous atheist Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), whose career as a public intellectual touched on a variety of disciplines, including philosophy (he is considered one o...

If I asked you the same question I asked my patient Aaron—“What do you want?”—and you could for a moment put aside the predictable anxiety that comes with it, I’m confident that at some point in your ...