Intersect

There’s a terrific show on AMC called “Into The Badlands.” It takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, and although the exact date is unknown, it’s obvious from the skeletons of interstate highway overpasses and the presence of cars that the show is based sometime after our current era—or perhaps in a parallel reality. The idea of before and after seems archaic to me lately. At any rate, guns are outlawed and territories divided into a series of fiefdoms run by Barons who control different natural resources. There’s a Baron who controls oil and gas, a Baron for river passage and transport, one who controls most of the grain supply. It’s an interesting scenario that allows the writers to explore some surprisingly existential questions. The philosophical and at times overtly religious nature of the show has surprised me because I initially tuned in for the terrific, sweeping, panoramic cinematography and jaw-dropping martial arts sequences (some of which are exhausting to watch at near...

Gracious God, you who are all the wisdom and grace of existence, you create through and for relationship. Before we took this form, we were in perfect relationship with you. In this form, we seek perfect relationship with you. After this form expires, as all things do, we will once again unite in perfect relationship with you. When the time comes for you to take physical form, we are formed and transformed until the spark of human birth graduates us to a new sense of being and a new sense of love for you. From the moment of our material birth, we form connections with our parents, the doctors and nurses caring for us, and all the aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, dogs, cats, and even strangers who will soon become family. We are carefully crafted for relationship, Holy One, from you, through you, to all that exists both seen and unseen. We celebrate all the people you have brought into our lives. For every story, every lesson, every shared laugh or tear, we thank you for the deep, pe...

Fragments from a diary dated to the time of the First Rip What follows is the official English translation of one of the most significant archaeological finds in history. Now referred to as “The Everyman Diary,” the text was overlooked for years. Discovered at a roadside antiquities tent in Machaerus (southwest of and across the Dead Sea from Bethlehem), the merchant claimed his daughter had found the diary in a small, unnamed, unexcavated, ancient village a few kilometers to the north. The diary was ignored for decades because its provenance and authenticity could not be established until recently, when work at the unnamed town revealed it to be the home of an influential religious movement organized just after the First Rip. Like the town, this sect has no recorded name, although a remnant remains today. This diary provides a rare glimpse into life just after the first paradigm-shifting Rip in the cosmos and the many ways people interpreted the event that changed our world forev...