There are kata in Uechi-Ryū Karate that are more dramatic than Sanchin. Seisan gives us more obvious fighting movements, while Sanseiryū asks us to coordinate…
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Author: Ian
Homelessness Is Someone’s Problem — Ours
Homelessness is an uncomfortable subject. Most of us, I hope, want to help. We do not want people sleeping beneath overpasses, living in tents beside…
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Hojo Undo: Building the Karate Body in Traditional Okinawan Karate
Walk into an old-fashioned Okinawan karate dojo and you may notice that some of the most important training equipment looks as though it belongs in…
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Crafting a Humanist Wedding: Ritual, Symbol, and the Celebration of Love
There is something profoundly human about a wedding. Long before we divide ceremonies into religious and secular, traditional and modern, sacred and civil, there is…
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Carl Sagan and the Humanist Vision: Wonder, Reason, and the Pale Blue Dot
There is a persistent misunderstanding about humanism that reduces it to what it does not believe. Humanists are sometimes described primarily as people who reject…
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A Short Definition of Humanism
I’ve written before about what humanism means, how it can be defined, and what it asks of us, and I am sure I will return…
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Humanism Before the Adjectives: Ethical, Secular, and Spiritual Humanism
Humanism is one of those words that becomes more complicated the moment we begin attaching adjectives to it. We speak of secular humanism, ethical humanism,…
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Borders Without Brutality: America’s Immigration Crisis
Immigration has become one of the most emotionally charged questions in American public life. It is spoken about in the language of invasion and resistance,…
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The Jewish Eye: A Very Brief History of Jewish Art from Antiquity to the Present
For much of history, Jewish civilization has been described primarily as a civilization of words. Torah, commentary, prayer, poetry, philosophy, law, and storytelling occupy such…
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Johannes Vermeer: Light, Silence, and the Art of the Dutch Golden Age
The first time I had the privilege of standing before an original Johannes Vermeer was at the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego, where…
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