Category Archives: Sunday Sermons

January 25, 2026

Alone with Our Thoughts

In what now seems the distant past — the late 1990s or early 2000s — as I walked to my car after work each evening, I noticed a common behavior in others also walking to their cars. A lot of them were talking on their cellphones.

This was before smartphones became a thing and long before apps on phones. To the extent there was texting, one had to laboriously use the dialing keypad. Those devices were just cellphones.

Watching so many walk-and-chat struck me as odd — I valued the quiet moments of transition from work to personal life.

2 Comments | tags: idle thoughts, stillness, thinking | posted in Society, Sunday Sermons

December 28, 2025

What the Dickens?

By Wyrd Smythe

I have written many times here about the wonderful Charles Dickens story, A Christmas Carol (1843). I wrote the first post back in December of 2012 when this blog was less than two years old. The most recent was ten years later, in December of 2022.

December, of course, because Christmas. Every year I watch as many adaptations as I can find (and I read the Dickens novella). It’s one of my favorite stories: it’s small and personal; it centers on a redemption arc; it has a classic happy ending; and it has ghosts.

This year I was struck by how it’s a powerful example of our cultural normative social values — something expressed throughout human literature.

13 Comments | tags: A Christmas Carol, moral philosophy, morality, morals and ethics | posted in Society, Sunday Sermons

June 2, 2024

Thoughts About Prayer

By Wyrd Smythe

One of the more interesting sermons I heard during my last bout of churchgoing involved the notion that prayer wasn’t necessary because God knows what’s really in our hearts. Per the dogma of Christianity, that’s actually a true point. (Albeit perhaps a surprising one for a pastor to preach.)

It points out a key distinction between theism and deism. In the former, most religions, God is personally involved with us and hears our prayers (God’s responses have always been a different matter.) In the latter, God is not personally involved and doesn’t.

On the other hand, some see prayer as merely a form of meditation.

12 Comments | tags: Albert Einstein, belief, deism, Dualism, faith, prayer, Spinoza, theism | posted in Religion, Sunday Sermons

May 26, 2024

Stillness and Solitude

By Wyrd Smythe

In the Science Notes post published last Friday, I didn’t have room for the last article that caught my eye in recent issues of New Scientist. This article was, I thought, a bit different from the others and seemed to require its own post.

Firstly, it has a meaty heft and ties in with an old post of mine as well as some notes I have for a post I thought to call Stillness Redux (in reference back to that old post).

What’s ironic to me is how what the article offers as possible anodyne for modern life is very much the life I’ve lived since I began navigating my own course across life’s seas.

11 Comments | tags: Science Notes, silence, stillness | posted in Society, Sunday Sermons

May 7, 2023

Lonely Lament

By Wyrd Smythe

The loneliest number?

Sometimes being single gets old. The tragedy for some lonely is they told the world, “I want to be alone! Go away!” And the world shrugged, listened and did. But the lonely often hope someone sees them enough, and loves them enough, to cross the barrier. (Regrettably, sometimes those who do are drawn for the wrong reasons or are predatory — the lonely can be easy prey.)

This post is a buffer flush of things I’ve written over many years in those moments when the silence and emptiness marked itself. They go back, in some cases, decades. More recently, though, I’ve found the secret to my own happiness and don’t suffer from these feels much anymore!

And I’ve realized (and embraced) that I was always a hermit at heart.

20 Comments | tags: loneliness, poetry | posted in Life, Sunday Sermons, Writing

January 22, 2023

The Shape of Discord

By Wyrd Smythe

I have posted many times about taking a parameter space view to avoid binary thinking (and the null or zero sense of being in the middle or on the fence). I’ve found the idea extremely helpful in understanding many aspects of life (hence all those posts).

It seems especially useful in these highly polarized and widely variegated times. (Even those who embrace “non-binary” ideas sometimes do so in a binary way.) But most real situations have many facets — many parameters. The space of human issues is big and cannot be well-characterized by two sides.

The parameter spaces metaphor provides a handle for visualizing such issues.

10 Comments | tags: parameter space | posted in Society, Sunday Sermons

August 28, 2022

50 Words for Snow

By Wyrd Smythe

Everyone knows “Eskimos have 50 words for snow.” Everyone knows that’s an urban myth. Both statements are true for appropriate values of everyone. The truth, of course and as usual, lies in the middle and is both more elusive and more nuanced.

The frosting: as with many of life’s more vexing issues, there is also a definitional component, and things depend, at least somewhat, on perspective. What constitutes a word and how does the basic language structure introduce new concepts, with new words or phrases?

But no matter because this post isn’t about the 50 words for snow.

17 Comments | tags: language, snow | posted in Opinion, Sunday Sermons

October 24, 2021

Embracing the Wager

By Wyrd Smythe

My dad and my dad’s dad were Lutheran ministers, and my dad’s brother taught theology at a Lutheran seminary. Lotta preachers on the paternal side of the tree. (Lotta teachers on the maternal side; mom and sis among them. I grew up with preachers and teachers.)

All of which gave me something of an insider view of religion and the organizational church. It also provided a cornerstone I’ve built on through much of my life: a reconciliation between the Yin of my science side and the Yang of my spiritual side.

One interesting place the two meet is Pascal’s Wager.

43 Comments | tags: atheism, belief, deism, faith, God, Pascal's Wager, theism | posted in Religion, Sunday Sermons

July 18, 2021

The Art of Debate

By Wyrd Smythe

The primary inspiration for this post, which I’ve been meaning to write since I started this blog, is a 1995 webpage titled The Art of Conversation. In fact, as I’ve done with this post, it could be called The Art of Debate, since debate over a topic — a dialectic — is what drives these (in fact ancient) ideas about discourse and rhetoric.

The page’s authors (Dean & Marshall VanDruff) give it other names: Conversational Cheap Shots! (on the site’s main page link) and Conversational Terrorism (on the page itself). The graphic, which I’ve shamelessly recreated here, calls it How Not To Talk.

Regardless, it’s about how to have an honest effective debate that actually goes somewhere. (Be that concordance or disagreement.)

20 Comments | tags: debate, dialectic | posted in Sunday Sermons

May 30, 2021

Window with a Worldview

By Wyrd Smythe

Exactly a year ago I wrote about metaphor as a tool for understanding the world around us. Our metaphors are part of the intuitive window through which we view reality. I think it’s good to have as many windows as possible, both in real life and in metaphor (intellectual rigor and creative insight are the metaphorical equivalent of Windex).

For a very long time, one of my key metaphorical windows has been the notion of Yin-Yang and its implicit notion of balance. One of my first posts was about it. Since then I’ve revisited it in myriad ways (see this, this, this, or this).

Here, among other things, I want to link Yin-Yang to another useful metaphor.

9 Comments | tags: parameter space, Science, scientism, Yin and Yang | posted in Sunday Sermons