Monsters at the Margin

VIRTUE IS FOUND at the margins of society more often than at its centre. If this is so, Mary Shelley's Monster is a real find! Her creature is an isolate of great sensitivity, kindness, and insight. Contrary to James Whale's 1931 film of the Creature as a lumbering dolt, Mary Shelley's Monster was modeled on Rousseau's notion of humanity as the "noble savage." The nobility of the Creature is evident as he unveils his chronicle to Victor Frankenstein upon the icy crags of Mount Blanc. Meet Frankenstein's Creature

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Resurrection: Beyond Ghosts and Ghouls

MORE THAN A fact or doctrine, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth embodies personal and historical hope. While reading a variety of viewpoints on the resurrection, I have been alternatively confused, comforted, restored and unexpectedly devastated by this theme. Internally and subjectively the resurrection is an encounter with the epicenter of meaning and significance. Without a living encounter and reliance on the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, spirituality amounts to little more than armchair speculation. This strikes at the root of my fears because my intellect hesitates to believe that a person whose bodily functions had ceased, whose tether to

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Desert Words to Live By

THE DESERT CAN be an empty place where the lost are driven insane by inner demons, or it can be a place of refuge and real where pilgrims escape the insanity of a chaotic world. Our desert experience is determined by how we cope with being alone. Solitude can bring strange illusions and despair or it can strip us of faulty dependence, filling us with a desire for our Creator.

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Passions of Prometheus

I DON'T THINK that it is inconsequential that my heroes are men.... It is not because women are not as passionate, creative, or in any way undeserving that they don't make my short list of heroes. Rather, it is because I share with most men an inclination toward "Prometheanism". I don't know why it is not as prevalent in most women. Perhaps it is the hard wiring of centuries of birthing and caring for life (if I am allowed that stereotypical explanation). I do not think it is because women are morally superior to men, only that

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The Stranger's Gospel: The Modern Magi

Quadra is the kind of place where you hear the oysters pop as you stroll down the beach, breathing in the fresh sea air. Vestiges of turbulent times are found in the cafeteria on the ferry from Campbell River. Under the ly lacquered trim, scrawled like a fossil, is an ancient peace symbol, or an upside down chicken track as the early locals saw it. From a table filled with laughter comes an anachronism of an early time, "That's really right on!" The slip doesn't go unnoticed, everyone groans. The men's hair is still long but groomed

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The Prophetic Protocol

Today's homily is called "The Prophetic Protocol," a strange title! Protocol is about the conventions needed to get things done. It's the how-to of life, whether it relates to our personal lives, our health, finances, worship, even our computers. Protocol requires a problem, a procedure, and a fix. It's a way of getting our feet out of the fire, a proven strategy. Our way of getting things done will differ, depending on the assumptions we make about the resources we have, and how we use them.

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Review of Faceless Killers

What does this to do with Swedish author Henning Mankell or his crime mystery Faceless Killers? This is a book response, not a parental rant against the strange world of technology. Kurt Wallander, Mankell's frumpy, grumpy Swedish crime investigator and I have something in common. We are both in danger of becoming culturally irrelevant, maybe extinct; both of us fear this looming prospect.

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Facets of Fat

ARISTOTLE REPRIMANDED GREENHORN scientists in his Academy for their immature disgust toward the gross and unappealing in nature. “The consideration of the lower forms of life ought not to excite a childish repugnance. In all natural things there is something to move wonder" (Boorstin 51). He believed that all things looked at impartially are manifestations of the divine. Ralph Ralph Waldo Emerson Waldo Emerson extended Aristotle's estimate of the beauty of nature into the process of death itself: “There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful. Even the corpse has

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The Light Side of Darkness

Many people label Edgar Allan Poe a horror writer, plain and simple. For them, "The Pit and the Pendulum" is a tale about a victim of the Spanish Inquisition, its terror and atrocities. The readers of the 1843 edition of The Gift periodical, published in Philadelphia, were intrigued by the frightening drama and tension found in the literal telling of this tale. A more rewarding approach, one that is truer to its author's intention, is to perceive The Pit as a poem of consciousness. After pondering The Pit's meaning, I believe that the story's strength and uniqueness lies in the

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Standing Alone Together

THERE IS A mind-boggling connection between creation and chaos. This unexpected synergy applies not only to creation's emergence from the primordial chaos but is mysteriously operational when people's spiritual foundations have crumbled. It is revealing that the Genesis creation accounts were woven together, as the poetry of the dispossessed, during a time of the exile and crisis of faith. Disorientation in communities and in individuals has a peculiar way of resulting in an inspired movement toward creativity and re-orientation. When we at Watershed were flailing around, wrestling God, shadowboxing in the post ‘91 period, many of us felt on the

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