Category Archives: BIC Capstone

How fitting it is that we arrived in Rhodes today, an island in Greece, and I started reading the third of four novels that I must read for Capstone: “Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays” by Christa Wolf. The reason for my amazement is that this book retells the story of the Trojan War from […] Continue reading →

Having read the book “My Name is Red” people have asked me why the book is named that way. One reason is that the book title, which resembles the titles of each chapter, causes the author and the reader to take up a persona within the story and to take up the conflicts and tensions […] Continue reading →

My task was to read the book without just thinking of it as a throw-away read. My job was to examine within the book, the relationships between art and philosophy, religion and the state, and western and Turkish culture. My undertaking was simple: look at the conflicting loyalties that each character has to family, religion, […] Continue reading →

Art is a form of expression and expression is how life’s simplest facts and deepest secrets are conveyed. Art comes in many different styles and have been used for many different purposes. However, art transcends time and culture and can teach us much about the culture from which the art originates, the subject of the […] Continue reading →

There is a saying that you can’t know anything for sure except for death and taxes. Death is also among the top things that humans fear. Well, it just so happened today that I read a chapter of Pamuk’s novel titled “I am Death” AND we visited the museum at Ephesus which had a portion […] Continue reading →

Today, we visited three amazing sites: Aphrodisias, Laodicia and Hieropolis. Not only were all the sites absolutely beautiful, but each were still being excavated. It is amazing to think that these cities have been here for so long and yet they have never been excavated until fairly recently. Yeah, I understand that it is very […] Continue reading →

“Baylor Interdisciplinary Core (BIC) Capstone: The Examined Life III” is the official name of this course. It follows Examined Life I, which prepared me to be an academic scholar in college and for life and briefly had me examine my own life in five dimensions: physical, intellectual, social, spiritual and emotional, and Biblical Heritage and […] Continue reading →

Prior to arriving in Turkey, I completed reading Orhan Pamuk’s novel, “Istanbul, Memories and the City” and completing a series of blogs on my understanding of the history and culture of the city. Now that I have spent four nights in Istanbul and sampled the major tourist sites and local hangouts, and gathered a wealth […] Continue reading →

About a week ago for the BIC capstone class, I wrote a blog on the religious landscape of Turkey. I wrote on the religious history of Turkey starting with traditional Pagan religions influenced by the Greeks, then the Christian heritage, Islam and then secularism in the new Turkish republic. In addition, I made some comparisons […] Continue reading →

Who am I? What is my purpose in life? These are the BIG fundamental questions that every person asks themselves sometime in their life. And ones that I have asked myself too. Orhan Pamuk spends his whole book describing his journey to these questions. His childhood centers on his search for identity in Istanbul. However, […] Continue reading →