Author: John A. Ross

For two years—but only two—the model of artistic activity provided me with a useful pattern of pegs on which to hang the central tenets of the Christian faith. Gradually however I became dissatisfied with the adequacy of the model. Even artists who are deeply devoted to their arts would probably…

Systems have been around for a long time—since the world began—or before! More ancient than spider webs, more universal than weather, more extensive than our sun and its planets, the intergalactic equivalent of the word “system” is undoubtedly stamped on the hub of the universe. “Primitive” tribes have always had…

Prospector Pete had never struck it rich. He’d spent most of his working life struggling through underbrush, wading up rocky streambeds and fighting off mosquitoes. Oh, he’d found a few deposits, but only enough to earn him grubstakes to keep going. But someday… Up a creek in the back country,…

You won’t learn much about how to knit from a quick glance at a woman with a knitting needle in each hand and a ball of yarn in her lap. You’ll have to follow carefully her every move as she knits, watching the needles and her fingers as they form…

When movie cameras had become cheap enough for families with modest means to own them, it was common to entertain guests by showing the latest home monies. On a family room screen we would watch our host striding out on the diving board, set at a daring two meters above…

Nothing is more important to you and me than the time which is our life. Yet we know almost nothing about time and seldom even talk about it. Space is easier for us to visualize, divide up, separate off, name and talk about. Most people can get excited about space…

At our summer place on Sechelt Inlet our firewood—and some of our building material—floats right up to our waterfront steps. A north wind with a super-high tide sometimes produces a passing parade of miscellaneous wooden relics of every size. Rejected logs, timbers from abandoned wharves and trees that have been…

The stage of a well-equipped theater has ways and means of removing curtain after curtain before the open stage is at last revealed to the audience. At the rear of the stage several backdrops can also be raised or lowered one after another as the play progresses. Each of them…

Did I succeed in convincing you that when things move, their movements are actually somewhat jumpy and jerky, much like a moving scene illuminated by stroboscopic flashes? You probably responded with thoughts to this effect: Well, maybe things do move discontinuously, but somewhere in every movement there’s got to be…

In the year that I was born, a girl baby was also born, but in a place a few hundred miles away. Throughout our childhoods those miles prevented me from having any contact with either her or her family. Not a word about my existence ever drifted through to her,…