By: Diane Tuttle on February 28, 2024
As a general rule, I do not use my phone while driving. Several years ago, we were at a football watch party with friends. Between plays, the conversations were always interesting. On one nondescript Sunday afternoon, the conversation turned to driving while talking on the phone. Our friend Andy, who is a neuropsychologist, chimed in…
By: Debbie Owen on February 28, 2024
We were on a cross-country driving trip when I told my sister about how apparently, an angel had taken care of me. It was July 2020, the month when it finally dawned on most people that Covid wasn’t going away “in two weeks.” After an ugly divorce, my sister – younger than I am by…
By: Julie O'Hara on February 28, 2024
Is it “safer to pour apple juice down the drain or to take it to a toxic waste dump?”[1] Out of context it feels like such a foolish question, but concluding that a substance one has been blithely consuming for years is suddenly become toxic was the result of what Kahneman calls the availability heuristic.…
By: Scott Dickie on February 28, 2024
“Race did not give birth to racism. Racism gave birth to race” (1). This is quite likely the statement that will be most often quoted from Malik’s comprehensive examination of the history and politics of race over the last two centuries. The pithy and memorable statement challenges the current notion of race as ‘fixed’ and…
By: Nancy Blackman on February 28, 2024
As soon as I began reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, I felt my body tense with anxiety. I had to stop because the triggers were firing. The reason for the triggers is that I was, once again, recognizing the limits of my brain. For most…
By: Graham English on February 28, 2024
I’m a newbie to robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Like Neo in The Matrix, this feels like I’m going down a rabbit hole that I never wanted to explore. My son-in-law designs robotic farm equipment. He has designed computers that, when integrated into a combine, can harvest crops without a human in the cab. When…
By: Esther Edwards on February 27, 2024
In 2022, our family took a long-awaited trip to Germany, the country where my father and mother grew up. As my uncle, now in his 80s, gave us a tour of Hameln, where my mother’s family originated from, we came across garbage lining the fencing of a well-traveled park which also was not kept up.…
By: Adam Cheney on February 27, 2024
A is for Anchor (Not so veiled attempt at anchoring my grade)[1] This week’s reading of Daniel Kahneman comes at a great time as I reflect on a meeting last week. In my meeting I had a quick System 1 reaction, followed by slowly processing it with System 2 thinking.[2] Though Kahneman’s book covers multiple…
By: Pam Lau on February 27, 2024
“Anyone who sets [themselves] up as “religious” by talking a good game is self-deceived. This kind of religion is hot air and only hot air. Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless…
By: Glyn Barrett on February 27, 2024
The Bat and Ball illustration[1] took me longer to get right than it should have, but that is probably the point. My impulsive System 1 took control, and intuition led me to the wrong answer. How could the answer not be 10 cents? So much for “Don’t think Blink![2]” When System 1 encounters a…
By: Joel Zantingh on February 26, 2024
I have plenty going on in my personal life to react to. I have trauma-impacted family situations that require my full non-anxious presence [1] and dynamics beginning to launch a network for peacemaking and reconciling work among Evangelicals which feels like offering a new map in an opposite direction from some more traditional routes churches…
By: Tim Clark on February 26, 2024
This week we read Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics[1] by Kenan Malik; this book was about how our society has come to think about race and the growing acceptance of race-based and identity-based ideology. We also explored the tension between diversity and equality, and pondered…
By: Jeff Styer on February 26, 2024
After reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow I feel like the peddler in Esphyr Slobodkina’s children’s book Caps for Sale. In this book, a peddler who sells caps is having a day of no sales, he is tired and goes out into the countryside and falls asleep underneath a tree wearing all his…
By: Jennifer Vernam on February 26, 2024
In his book Not So Black and White, Kenan Malik is preaching a message of “universalism”- an idea that a lot of us can relate to, even if we are not familiar with the term. Universalism is the belief that everyone should be treated equally, regardless of their race. The first part of the book…
By: Travis Vaughn on February 26, 2024
In Not So Black and White: A History of Race From White Supremacy to Identity Politics, Kenan Malik wants to “turn the common sense argument” around racism “on its head.”[1] Instead of the commonly held perspective of racial inequality as treating people “unequally because they belong to, or are seen as belonging to, distinct races,”[2]…
By: Jennifer Eckert on February 25, 2024
Last week, Nex Benedict, a sixteen-year-old non-binary student was beaten up at school by fellow students, and later died. The following day, when asked his thoughts on the matter, the Oklahoma State Senator for that district, Tom Woods, responded, “We are a religious state, and we are going to fight it to keep that filth…
By: Noel Liemam on February 25, 2024
This book, ‘A FAILURE OF NERVE’ by Edwin H. Friedman is a bit difficult and cumbersome for me to grasp for my week’s reading. So, I went back and forth between what others said about it, while doing my reading. This process helps me a lot. But I would still need more time to fully…
By: Jana Dluehosh on February 23, 2024
Our brains, a territory yet to be fully discovered, and underutilized. I came face to face with truly understanding how very little we actually know about our own brains as a parent who has had to journey with all three of my children having some sort of neural divergence. My oldest having…
By: Daren Jaime on February 23, 2024
In this week’s writing, Edwin Friedman speaks to the anxiety of America and the emotional regression that ensues from a failure of leadership. Fast forward to 2024. It is hard to move the needle on the climate of America as there is still plenty of room for anxiety. A quick glance at today’s headlines and…
By: Akwese on February 23, 2024
Anxiety and overwhelm weren’t big issues for me until recently, after a build-up of chronic stress that had me in the hospital almost every week for a year and a half. While everything in me wanted to focus on helping myself, there was always work to be done, so I did what any “hard worker”…
