Hi everyone, I'm Beth. I live in Oakland (with Mr. Cone, my husband) and work at a real estate consulting firm in SF. I graduated from U of C last year in geography, and my academic background is pretty social sciences-heavy. I'm mostly interested in James as an example of psychological thinking, which I have always found fascinating but nothing about. As others have mentioned, I don't read as much as I used to and am looking forward to flexing those muscles.

My family is devoutly Catholic, and my dad works for the Catholic church. I grew up pretty close to being a preacher's daughter, for a religion with celibate clergy. I was a devout and sincere practicer, too, until I had an abrupt break of faith at age 15. I'm still not sure what brought that on, but it hasn't reversed and ever since I have tried to avoid thinking about religion much. Honestly, I'm nervous about reopening this can of worms, but what the hell. Opportunity knocks or something.

On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 5:07 PM, Gabriela Russek <grussek@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone,
I'm Gabi, and I live in Toronto, but have mostly lived in New York City and Chicago. At U. of C., I majored in Law, Letters, and Society, and now am in an M.A. in Human Geography program.

I'm here for a deeper philosophical exploration of topics I've explored informally for years. I've never studied religion or psychology academically, but discuss them a lot with friends of all faiths--atheists, Buddhists, Muslims, Messianic Jews, etc.--and psychological philosophies. I've participated in worship and informal study practices of many faiths, but identify as Jewish and go to synagogue regularly for a mix of spiritual and cultural (but not really faith-related) reasons. I also lived, worked, and shared religious practices at an interfaith retreat centre for much of last year. I've always been fascinated by, but can't fathom, the religious experiences of people with real faith in God or the supernatural. That's part of what intrigues me about the title of the book we'll be reading.

On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 12:51 PM, Steven Lucy <slucy@moomers.org> wrote:

Hi everyone,

I spent my academic career waffling between social sciences and hard sciences
before saying fuck it all to start a produce store. I'm looking forward to
this group because (spoiler alert) my new year's resolution is to read more
books. It's amazing how easy it is to fall off the intellectual reading wagon
once you exit academia.

I live in Chicago and have for a long time, but I've also lived a lot of other
places.

Steven

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