Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash When I was 22 and started going to sea aboard commercial merchant vessels as a junior officer, I sailed aboard tankers carrying various petroleum products to ports on the coasts of the United States, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. The tankers I sailed on in those days carried about 20,000 tons of a product such as gasoline or jet fuel which translates to about 7 million gallons. Now 7 million gallons of gasoline or jet fuel has a lot of

During the past several decades, there has been a growing interest in Native American culture and, in particular, there has been interest in their religious experience and spirituality. Why this is so is complex, but probably one of the key reasons is that there is a crisis of spirit in American religious life. Aside from the ever-popular hellfire and brimstone religions of the religious right, mainstream religions have lost their meaning to many Americans. As I have suggeste

Photo by Aniket Bhattacharya on Unsplash As a child growing up Roman Catholic, I remember hearing my Sunday school religious education teachers always telling us that Easter was the most important religious holiday. I could never figure out why – because Christmas was so much more fun particularly since it involved getting a lot of presents. To me, Easter seemed boring. As a child I could even grasp the religious importance of Jesus, as the savior, coming into the world – but

Photo by Stephan Widua on Unsplash One of the most famous examples of the conflict between religion and science was the situation with Galileo and the Catholic Church. In 1632, Galileo published a work that defended the heliocentric theory which said the earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way around. This was heresy according to the Church because in the Book of Joshua it says Joshua prayed to have the sun remain stationary in the sky to allow for more daylig

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash The actions of prophets and their prophecies have been around since the dawn of civilization. So, just what is a prophet? Very generally speaking, a prophet is one who takes stock of the world around them and then offers predictions on what will happen in the world in the near or long-term future. This is true in both a religious and secular sense. George Orwell was considered a secular prophet when, in the 1940s, he wrote his books “1984” and