Every Sunday morning, familiar faces walk through the doors of our meeting space at Galveston Bay Oasis. These weekly regulars greet each other and enter into jovial conversation as they work together to set up the coffee, sound equipment, and welcome table...

Tim Sledge’s October 4th blog post “You Don’t Have to Love Someone if You Don’t Want To,” touched on something that I think deserves more exploration, especially as we enter the winter holiday season.

Life, as we know, is complicated. At the center of life is competition. All of life is a competitive process – for success and sometimes for survival itself. This is why competitions are so popular.

Have you heard this? “But what about before the Big Bang?” “What about life coming from inorganic material?” “What about missing links?” “But what about consciousness?”

Many of us here at Oasis know that. We have over a dozen writers among us who were at one time active in the Oasis Writer's Group.

Homeschool—a loaded term with a history that reeks of religious indoctrination and keeping children out of touch with modern society. But it’s not like that for most homeschoolers today.

This blog is in response to a call out for Oasiens to submit an article for our community blog post. It’s not often that I draw a blank when seeking topics to write about. However, with this week’s blog that appears to be the case.

You don’t have to love someone if you don’t want to. If your response is, “Everybody knows that,” you’ve probably never been religious...

Dad and Irene, his first wife, grew up in Sylvester, TX, a small, dusty, West Texas town with no more than a few hundred people in the whole county. Dad never talked about Irene.

I was 8 years old, fidgeting in my seat, sandwiched between my father and my grandmother in Sunday morning church. It was hour two of a long Catholic service and I was regretting not going to the children's class with all the songs and snacks...

Conventional wisdom in the conservative, religious circles of my evangelical days is that dealing with death without the belief in a god and the corresponding afterlife is unbearable. In the early days after I walked away from religion without a backward glance, I often wondered what secular humanists and atheists offered to the grieving to replace that “comfort.”

When I was very young, America was “el otro lado.” The other side. That ominous, vaguely mystical phrase was how people around me in Mexico referred to my future home country. This little phrase forever colored the way that I saw the US.

If there’s a word I miss from my religious life it’s “sacred.” In my upbringing, God was inked into every pixel of life...

Last Summer, Houston Oasis and the greater Oasis Network experienced an unprecedented change in our leadership structure. Because of the drastic change and the many questions that came with it, Oasis hosted our first ever “Town Hall” event...

A "theory of everything", 

The doggie daycare looked like heaven compared to my lawn which was full of brambles and weeds. Through the fence I could see a perfectly manicured yard, a little obstacle course for the hounds to run through, a doggie pool where a golden retriever shook his coat freely, with almost a wry smile only a happy puppy could give...

Until quite recently, it has been assumed by everyone literate in science that intelligent life, which I will refer to as Life As We Know It (LAWKI) is common in the cosmos. That proposition is becoming less likely with every scrap of new knowledge that we acquire.

When an Alabama judge wanted to put a stone copy of the Ten Commandments in his courthouse he was asked to name them and could not. It reinforces my belief that we who do not believe in the Bible need to know it in order to have constructive conversations with those professing belief in its inerrancy. Here are a few of my thoughts on the Ten Commandments.

If there is one thing that you shouldn’t do as a teacher, it is belittle students. They are still learning to express themselves, to develop complex ideas and how to test them. Despite knowing that, I couldn’t help but laugh when Scott, a nice but lazy teen, complained about the essay I had assigned him.

I don’t remember the exact date that I decided to stop believing in God, but I like to recall It as a glorious renunciation on a hilltop while looking out at the stars in the night sky. With arms outstretched. I laugh and cry joyously as I contemplate the wonders of the universe.