The October Academy presentation featured guest speaker Mark Reimers. How do the billions of neurons in your head, tangled together like jello spaghetti, produce feeling, determination, love and laughter? Waking up, deliberation, remembering, effortful thinking, inner conflict, and day-dreaming are all aspects of consciousness. We will discuss how studies of brain activity during these kinds…

Ralph Waldo Emerson decried the Unitarianism of his day as “corpse-cold” and urged the religion to evolve with new understandings of the contemporary world. Those understandings are still with us today, but our Living Tradition asks us to continue evolving with the times. Dr. Matthew Shear will share with us a positive view of what…

Photo credit https://infiniteleaders.co/executive-coaching-advisory/ For decades, Artificial Intelligence was one of those “maybe someday” dreams. Seemingly out of nowhere, ChatGPT exploded on the scene in early 2023. The clock is now ticking – the capabilities of A.I. are going to improve exponentially, and very quickly. As with almost every technological advancement in our lifetime, we find…

Discussions about nuclear weapons are often framed as security, legal, political or military issues. Yet equally important are moral and ethical perspectives, and faith communities play a critical role in bringing in such dimensions to discourses about nuclear weapons, which poses existential threats to humanity and our planet. In this talk, Anna Ikeda of Soka Gakkai International will…

As we hear distressing stories of violence and oppression from around the world, we may benefit from reminding ourselves of times and places when human beings did organize themselves into durable just societies. In this talk Dr. Reimers discusses some of these times and places: from the world’s first cities in 4000 BCE, to  the…