David W. Boles' RelationShaping

Does perceiving violent acts -- real or imagined -- change the shape of your brain and how it processes information?  The blunt -- and likely unpopular -- answer is, "Yes." 

Taking the classroom online not only re-forms relationships and ways of knowing -- distance learning also creates memeingful teacher and student dyads that can be stronger apart than when collected in the same physical classroom.

The modern world made a sea change when the wood pencil was replaced by a mechanical one -- and what was lost in that industrial design exchange was our tether to the land, a sense of impermanence, and a shared yearning for renewable resources.

Today we live in danger of surviving only in essences and not experiences.

We love a Semiotic world where images can have a variety of meanings and influences depending on the eye perceiving the message.  

Beware of the curse of proprietary technology!

The great American Playwright Eugene O'Neill said, in the early 1900's:

"The greatest challenge to mankind over the next century will be the failure of science and technology to replace the death of the old God."

Science has pinched God!

War not only ravages the body.  War savages the family.  War kills the future.  War assassinates the now.  A soldier's widow was forced by the United States Military to not only fight for her right to her dead husband's sperm, but she was also pressed to dig into the muck and mire of a rigid military system that was unkind to the living remnants of a fallen body.  Kynesha Dhanoolal won the battle, but lost her war.

Are we only our DNA?  Or is there more to us than just blood and guts?  Can the essence of us live beyond our lives and into the horizon of others?

Two recent stories about The Suicide Heart and a Craving for Fried Chicken lead us into the realm of the uncanny.