Stories By Van

Antigone, a heroine, icon, and role model has survived the test of time for over two thousand years, and with valid reason. Her actions depicted in the play Antigone by Sophocles are those of courage and fearlessness. She also conveys a sense of deep conviction in the pursuit of truth as she stared deep into the eyes of injustice by her oppressor. Valiance is a quality that Antigone has in abundance; she exhibits this with virtually every word she speaks as if she is possessed by the Gods on a righteous journey to lay her brother’s body to rest in an act of defiance against the newly appointed king of Thebes, Creon. It is no surprise that today Antigone is regarded as a role model for women and more specifically feminists. To truly appreciate the character, we must take a closer look into the context of her environment. Patriarchy was alive and strong in ancient Greece and men dominated the political and social spectrum. Their methods of justification stemmed from classical m...

March is many things — a month when we set back our clocks, a month when we celebrate the return of spring, a month when we consistently find ourselves over or under dressed for the weather, no matter what the actual temperature is — but it is also Women’s History Month! This is the month where we revel in learning about all manner of female history-makers, from the big names to the unsung heroes. It's also a time when we focus on learning more about the female perspective on big movements in human history. If you’re all about egalitarianism, though, you might be wondering why one gender needs a particular month devoted to its contributions to and arguments about history. And the answer’s actually pretty simple: It’s because, when it comes to history, the story of women is largely one of exclusion, silence, absence and bias, and we need a month (at minimum) to redress the balance. Women have made a lot of history, but sometimes, looking at the history books, you wouldn’t exac...

Existential therapists frequently encounter the ultimate questions of freedom and change, deliberating on how much of each is actually possible. The clients who see them often find themselves trapped between two opposing world-views: one is the philosophical, based on the belief, espoused by existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, that humans are responsible for their own destinies, and the other is the pseudo-scientific, mainstream one, which posits that individuals struggling with mental illness can’t help themselves. Both constitute extreme perspectives, which tend to be held by conservatives and liberals, respectively. In the sphere of social, economic, and mental health challenges, conservatives have a “pick himself up by the bootstrap” mentality, which minimizes, or even negates, environmental effects and biological/psychological constraints. To them, man is essentially nothing but pure free-will; all he has to do is want something badly enough and then somehow create...

A vision quest is a rite of passage, similar to an initiation, in some Native American cultures. It is a turning point in life taken before puberty to find oneself and the intended spiritual and life direction. When an older child is ready, he or she will go on a personal, spiritual quest alone in the wilderness, often in conjunction with a period of fasting. This usually lasts for a number of days while the child is tuned into the spirit world. Usually, a Guardian animal will come in a vision or dream, and the child's life direction will appear at some point. The child returns to the tribe, and once the child has grown, will pursue that direction in life. After a vision quest, the child may apprentice an adult in the tribe of the shown direction (Medicine Man, boatmaker, etc). The vision quest may be a part of shamanism, more exactly, the learning and initiation process of the apprentice for achieving the ability for shamanism, mostly under the guidance of an older shama...

Because of my ignorance of knowledge when it comes to lab mice and most biological and cellular science studies, this article comes from the UNL Newsroom website  back in November of 2018. Beating their brethren to the gut can help bacteria make a lasting impression, says new research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The study suggests that the order in which bacterial species stake out unclaimed territory in the gut can shape an intestinal ecosystem for a lifetime, potentially shifting the odds of certain health outcomes in the process. Though timing wasn’t everything, multiple experiments showed that species given early access to the intestinal tracts of germ-free mice — before the prime real estate had been seized by others — generally took advantage. Over several months, the biodiversity of those burgeoning gut ecosystems often came to be dominated by, or at least resemble, the species that got there first. “These early colonizers, even when they didn’t persi...

Popularized by the 1984 film, a bizarre low-budget sequel, and a 2012 Syfy channel movie, tales of the Philadelphia Experiment involves covert U.S. Navy operations that led to time travel, teleportation, and mangled flesh. According to urban legends, two separate and completely different Philadelphia Experiments took place. Both, however, involved the same vessel, the USS Eldridge. What happened in each of these alleged experiments, and what evidence is there to support the rumors? Two separate sets of bizarre events make up the "Philadelphia Experiment." Both revolve around a Navy Destroyer escort, the USS Eldridge, with the events taking place on two separate days in the summer and fall of 1943. In the first experiment, an alleged method of electrical field manipulation allowed the USS Eldridge to be rendered invisible on July 22, 1943 in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. The second rumored experiment was the teleportation and small-scale time travel (with ...

Reincarnation, also called transmigration or metempsychosis, in religion and philosophy, rebirth of the aspect of an individual that persists after bodily death—whether it be consciousness, mind, the soul, or some other entity—in one or more successive existences. Depending upon the tradition, these existences may be human, animal, spiritual, or, in some instances, vegetable. While belief in reincarnation is most characteristic of South Asian and East Asian traditions, it also appears in the religious and philosophical thought of local religions, in some ancient Middle Eastern religions (e.g., the Greek Orphic mystery, or salvation, religion), Manichaeism, and gnosticism, as well as in such modern religious movements as theosophy. In many local religions, belief in multiple souls is common. The soul is frequently viewed as capable of leaving the body through the mouth or the nostrils and of being reborn, for example, as a bird, a butterfly, or an insect. The Venda of southern...