It started just how they said on Oprah. You were always sorry after. And I always came back.

The 2020 pandemic need not preclude Community Group meetings. We can, of course, use Zoom.us, as we do for our regular meetings. The advantage is that Zoom is not limited by distance; the disadvantage is that it is a bit impersonal...

Often, interactions from one generation to the next do not seem so easy to bridge.

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.

A "theory of everything", 

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.

I was kicked out of school in eighth grade. One fine day I decided that hiding a squirt gun under my desk and firing away at our science teacher’s fly was a good idea.

I consider myself an accepting person and approaching things with an open mind is important to me. But even I was nervous having a conversation with a man who was addicted to a PCP...

We live in Houston, the long-time home and heart of the oil and gas and petrochemical manufacturing industries in the United States. These industries make the news all over the world entirely too often because of a never-ending stream of explosions, fires, releases, spills, injuries and fatalities...

There has been a lot of discussion about automation, artificial intelligence, and how technology in general will impact our future. Most of these discussions are centered on concerns of how income and wealth will be distributed when only a small fraction of humanity can be meaningfully employed.

How many of us are aware of just how many jobs are going to be replaced in the near future by automation and artificial intelligence?

The expression “pictures don’t lie” was used pretty frequently when I was growing up – I was born in the mid-80’s, in case I date myself too much. Today, in much the same way that most children born after the year 2000 have never seen a roll of film, you don’t hear this phrase much anymore, at least in my experience

My first responsibility as an educator is to make sure my students are safe at all times. This includes managing the classroom climate, modifying lesson plans for students, and knowing them, as well as the culture they are a part of. This is a huge undertaking. It also includes keeping them safe during an active shooting episode.

In many respects, I breathe the Oasis core values. As a scientist by training who serves others, my favorite core values are: “Reality is known through reason” and “Human hands solve human problems.” Today though, I want to address the core value I struggle with the most: “Be accepting and be accepted.”

A community of reason and compassion. That is how we describe the Houston Oasis Community. It’s an encapsulation of the community’s core values. Yet beneath this simple expression lies complexity and ambiguity...