Tripping with Christians

(If you are interested in further articles about or from me, I can refer you to an interview I gave to The Student Times and my first article about the US Presidential Elections and data science on my blog at iHNed.cz.)

For this semester, I have chosen a very interesting combination of courses, almost all of which share a main topic: agency. Introduction to Psychology explores it from one side; two courses in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Computational Vision & Biological Perception, from another. (Since both courses are graduate seminars, they're giving me a rather hard time.) Probability Theory contains statistical foundations important for decision-making at large; concepts from this course appear in all above-mentioned others.

The "black sheep" of my schedule is U. S. Gay & Lesbian History. It is a fascinating course, which is difficult to squeeze into a single semester. Few other matters are more complicated than the history of sexuality; maybe this is why it is so interesting.

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One of my non-academic goals for this semester was to avoid staying in New Haven over break. (This happened to me twice last year - quite impeccably, I managed to catch the flu at the start of both the fall and the spring break. Never more.) When I encountered an opportunity to depart for three days into the Fall beauty that is New Hampshire, I did not hesitate for a second.

The catch? The trip was organized by Yale Students for Christ. And I am quite the atheist.

On the other hand, this is why they invited me in the first place. I've been friends with the YSC for some time; I've been making regular stops at their campus apologetic literature table and already shared tea and strawberries with the YSC head last semester. It is my motivation to understand, what and why they believe, as well as how it affects their lives. So when I stopped at their table for another apologetic load, Lara offered an opportunity to ask questions during break, when we'll all have more time for them. Remembering Radka's spring break with the Amish, I accepted the offer.

It was a very good decision. The Lifelines organization, a subsidiary of the Campus Crusade for Christ, was responsible for the programme that combined wilderness experience with spirituality deepening. What does that mean? In practice, we first engaged in physical activity (touring, rock-climbing, and playing various games) and then stopped to discuss the deeper questions of trust, relationships, and beauty. This started generally at first ("What prevents you from seeing beauty in the world?") and concluded spiritually ("What does the beauty you perceive tell you about God?"). Perceived beauty tells me nothing of God; this is why I tended to listen to the answers in order to form questions. In the meantime, I enjoyed the nature, which was truly divine. Figuratively speaking.

Christians on the trip were all extremely nice; a few of them stayed up until three a.m. to explain my dabbling questions. How do they build their relationship with Jesus and what does that actually mean? Why do they extrapolate from the Bible some moral laws and not others? It is worth mentioning that this discussion was the most explicit religious thing that took place at the trip - the only common prayer took place before meals, and not even before every meal.

The trip with Christians was fun; I'd go again. In the immediate future, however, it seems that we'll stay at tea and strawberries - after all, many questions still remain.

(All photos taken by Nancy Jiang.)

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As my trip concluded on Friday and a microfinance conference started in New Jersey on Saturday, I used the meantime to visit Marek - which is something that tends to happen to me more and more. (Thank you, Marek!) Microfinance conference itself was interesting not only by virtue of content, but also of attendance: it is fascinating how different student organizations approach the same problem.

We've returned from the conference just in time for the last Metro-North train out of New York City, before Hurricane Sandy shut transit down. Sandy hurt the shore quite a bit; Yale even cancelled instruction for two days (for the first time after 34 years!)  and instituted a curfew. Students were safe partially for that reason; not even a wifi outage occurred. That, after all, was unsurprising. The extent to which my school is its own world is elegantly spelled out by a single fact: Yale has its own power plant.