James A Erickson, D.Min., MFT

06/25/2025

06/21/2025

Pain is the price of being alive. But to feel another’s pain—that’s what it means to be human. In a world so often numbed by distraction and disconnection, empathy is not weakness—it’s awakening.

Tolstoy

06/19/2025

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

- The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain

05/19/2025

From Art Goodtimes:
📚 Huxley Warned Us. We Just Didn't Listen.

"Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and interest in facts… Their critical habit of mind makes them resistant to the kind of propaganda that works so well on the majority."
— Aldous Huxley

This quote isn’t just a thought. It’s a warning siren from the past, screaming into our digital present.

Huxley saw it before we did:
📲 Propaganda no longer shouts—it whispers in your feed.
📈 Outrage gets rewarded.
🧠 Critical thinking gets buried.

In a world where news is curated, truth is personalized, and belief is sold in algorithmic bundles, the intellectual has become not just a thinker—but a resistor.

And no—Huxley wasn’t talking about ivory-tower elites or academic gatekeepers. He meant anyone with the courage to ask, "Is this true?"

So what does it mean to be an intellectual today?
It means:

❓Holding doubt where others hold dogma

🔍 Questioning your sources—and yourself

🧠 Choosing rationality over rage

📢 Refusing to be a consumer of noise, and becoming a curator of knowledge

The battle isn’t left vs. right—it’s truth vs. manipulation.
And every scroll, every share, every conversation is a front line.

Here’s what we must do:
Guard your mind. Your attention is currency. Spend it wisely.

Cultivate humility. Being wrong is how you grow.

Invite friction. Challenge your views. Engage your opposites.

Support truth-tellers. Demand platforms that value evidence.

Become a teacher. Pass on the fire of inquiry—quietly, relentlessly.

This isn’t just a post. It’s a call to intellectual arms.
Because the revolution won’t be televised—it’ll be whispered mind to mind.

💡 Don’t drown in the noise. Rise with reason.

05/07/2025

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals; despise riches; give alms to every one that asks; stand up for the mentally and emotionally impaired; devote your income and labor to others; hate tyrants; argue not concerning God; have patience and indulgence toward humanity; take off your hat (bow) to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men; go freely with those who lack power, are uneducated, are still young, and are mothers and caretakers; read these instructions in the open air every season of every year of your life; reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book; dismiss insults; and your very flesh and existence shall be a great poem”

~Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Curated by HELL AND EARTH See

04/24/2025

“Christian joy is about the experience of a peace that remains in our hearts, even when we are pelted by trials and afflictions, for then we know that we are not alone, but accompanied by a God who is not indifferent to our lot. When seas are rough: the storm is always on the surface but the depths remain calm and peaceful. That is also true of Christian joy: it is a free gift, the certainty of knowing that we are loved, sustained and embraced by Christ in every situation in life. He is the one who frees us from selfishness and sin, from the sadness of solitude, from inner emptiness and fear, and gives us a new look at life and history: ‘With Christ joy is constantly born anew’”. (Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 1)..

04/23/2025

“I want to tell you, carry on
keep riding the waves of love, of charity,
be surfers of love”
Pope Francis, World Youth Day, 2023

04/23/2025

Spring roses

04/22/2025

Tolerance = bearing the burden of the biased self

03/23/2025

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.”
Lord Byron

03/23/2025

“Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.”
Joseph Cambell