A Classroom has a Soul
When I was in seminary, I had planned my master’s thesis around the title “Psyche and Spirit in the Classroom.” I see now that this was a skew frame, at an awkw...
Tag: zen
the practice of suchness
My True Teacher
Having a childAfter 18 months I still can't sayWhat it's like 4th Ave & 12th St, Manhattan
Clouds of Witness
I was in Austin, Texas for a few days before I really looked up at the sky. I saw churning clouds under a hot sun, a favorite object of contemplation of mine in...
The Math Koan, or: Zen Problem Solving
I wrote an article that the good people at Lion’s Roar published. You can find it here!
Our Aeonic Fire
Book of Serenity #30: Dasui’s Aeonic Fire A monk asked Dasui, “When the fire at the end of an aeon rages through and the whole universe is destroyed, is this de...
Living close to my own life
Book of Serenity #20: Dizang’s Nearness Dizang asked Fayan, “Where are you going?” Fayan said, “Around on pilgrimage.” Dizang said, “What is the purpose of pilg...
Skillful means for math students and showing up for teacher work
Dear Reader, it is late August! School is beginning soon! For me, that means it’s time to reflect on my goals while I still have the bandwidth to do so. I ended...
Teaching and Skillful Means
The end of the school year is the best time to think about the next school year, since obviously I’ve got nothing else going on. I’m working on a few things to ...
Theological values in secular math education
Before continuing to look at math education in the light of, on one hand, a drastically uncertain future, and on the other, values inherent in that work that we...
Stepping Back
I’ve been to a handful of silent retreats before, so when my teachers on this most recent one said, “don’t try to get anything out of this,” I knew what they me...
PBL: Peoples’ Math and Not-Knowing Math
Yesterday, I had my first meeting with colleagues preparing for the new school year. I am still happily entrenched in the pace of the summer (the only tolerable...
Reflections after a silent retreat
I returned from my zendo’s ten-day silent retreat just yesterday, called a “sesshin” (which means “gathering the mind”). This is not my first time on sesshin, b...
More like you than you
I’ve often felt an affinity for the marginalized. It comes from an early place in my life of feeling marginalized myself — powerless or less important or unable...
I know they say this tent is waterproof but I’ve pitched it at sea.
On the meaning of the teaching of Origen of Alexandria, from his Of Tents and Wells. And so, contemplating in the Spirit these progressions, he calls them the “...
Why leave the palace?
As the story goes, Shakyamuni Buddha was a prince in northern India. Before his birth, it was prophesied that he was destined to become one of two things: a gre...
On the “broad and generous spirit…”
In my last post, I ended with Darlene Cohen on the benefits of facing our pain, rather than distracting from it or trying to push it away: …you begin to feel ge...
On entering the pain
This year I am participating in a yearlong workshop at the Village Zendo called The Path of Awakening, focusing on Zen responses to the Others we create accordi...
On obedience, attention, and freedom
It’s snowing, a lot, everywhere, so this morning I was reading Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century German mystic (obviously). In the first installment of hi...
Applying the compassionate infrastructure (New Year’s reboot)
And we’re back. When I first started this blog in September I had pretty grand designs for what and how I was going to write here. Looking back, I think more of...
On Columbus and a New World
So I woke up thinking about the New World, because it’s Columbus Day. The big irony is that his New World was nothing new, that he didn’t discover anything beca...
A meditation on the first day of school
This is a honkadori that I love, based on a story in the Lotus Sutra in which a character doesn’t realize that he’s a bodhisattva, a Buddhist saint dedicated to...
Dharma Combat with Augustine
On the meaning of the teaching of St. Augustine of Hippo, addressing God in the first paragraph of his Confessions: You have made us for yourself, and our heart...
On a secular theology
Much of what I write on this blog will be notes toward a secular theology. The fact that I write as a “Theological Engineer” might already suggest that my theol...
About the Theological Engineer
I’m a math-teacher theologian Zen-Buddhist New-Yorker. I have studied and practiced engineering, education, theology, depth psychology, and all of the above app...