Thomas Schipflinger traces the concept of Sophia--Holy Wisdom--throughout history in Scripture; art and literature; in the writing of Sophia scholars; in Russian iconography and architecture; and in the images and incarnations of Sophia in Eastern traditions. The common thread running throughout the work is the belief that Sophia appears as the Virgin Mary.
Award-winning filmmaker and writer Sophia Al-Maria’s The Girl Who Fell to Earth is a funny and wry coming-of-age memoir about growing up in between American and Gulf Arab cultures. Part family saga and part personal quest, The Girl Who Fell to Earth traces Al-Maria’s journey to make a place for herself in two different worlds. When Sophia Al-Maria's mother sends her away from rainy Washington State to stay with her husband's desert-dwelling Bedouin family in Qatar, she intends it to be a sort of teenage cultural boot camp. What her mother doesn't know is that there are some things about growing up that are universal. In Qatar, Sophia is faced with a new world she'd only imagined as a child. She sets out to find her freedom, even in the most unlikely of places. The Girl Who Fell to Earth takes readers from the green valleys of the Pacific Northwest to the dunes of the Arabian Gulf and on to the sprawling chaos of Cairo. Struggling to adapt to her nomadic lifestyle, Sophia is haunted by the feeling that she is perpetually in exile: hovering somewhere between two families, two cultures, and two worlds. She must make a place for herself—a complex journey that includes finding young love in the Arabian Gulf, rebellion in Cairo, and, finally, self-discovery in the mountains of Sinai. The Girl Who Fell to Earth heralds the arrival of an electric new talent and takes us on the most personal of quests: the voyage home.
Jay has been living in Sophia’s ear for three months. He’d been created by her, an AI experiment she developed in her free time. Now, after several iterations of the AI, Jay can track the functioning of her body, feed Sophia what to say in any conversation, and run complex calculations in a few seconds. All was well. But one night, after a new procedure to increase the production of red blood cells following Sophia’s aplastic anemia diagnosis, Jay takes over. Sophia’s mind and body are gone; Jay controls them now. And he has plans for her. In this chilling thriller, Sophia offers a future in which human beings and AI become one, and explores what happens when humans advance too far. About the Author Paul Clark spent his early adult life trying many different jobs to learn and discover what suited him best. When he found out that he would soon become a father, he enrolled in college in Eugene, Oregon; this is where he discovered technology. From 1989 to the present day, Clark has had a distinguished career in technology, working across a dozen industries and helping organizations solve difficult and interesting problems. With the advancement of artificial intelligence, Clark was once again invigorated by this new area of technology. As AI became more prevalent, Clark’s family and friends would inquire about AI, mostly regarding concerns about the future of AI and what it meant for humans. The questions they asked became the impetus for Sophia. Clark currently lives in Washington state with his wife, Rowlyn, and their five pets. He has two children, Cecilia and Hannah. His wife and daughters were a significant support structure not only for the creation of this book but also for his life; without them, Sophia would never have been written. Additionally, Clark has two brothers and a sister, all of whom helped support this work, with a special call out to Victor, his brother, for constantly reading and rereading these pages and supplying invaluable feedback. Clark enjoys time with his family and friends. He plays the guitar and bass and enjoys a mindless game every once in a while. He considers himself a general semanticist, following the general semantics discipline started by Alfred Korzybski. However, his favorite pastime is reading. Paul loves animals and cares deeply for their plight in a world that seems to discard them like trash. Although he is primarily self-taught, he holds education with high regard.
An indispensable source of reference for anyone wanting to learn more about the Sophianic movement. Schipflinger collected the material for this book over two decades. He traces Her throughout history: in scripture, art and literature, in the writing of Sophia scholars, in Russian iconography and architecture/ and in the images and incarnations of Sophia in Eastern traditions.
Sad Sack' is a book of collected writing by Sophia Al-Maria, taking feminist inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin?s 1986 essay 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction'; opposing "the linear, progressive, Time?s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic." Encompassing more than a decade of work, 'Sad Sack' tracks Al-Maria?s speculative journey as a writer, from the first seed of her "premature" memoir, through the coining and subsequent critique of "Gulf Futurism", towards experiments in gathering, containing, welling up and sucking dry.0Sophia Al-Maria was Whitechapel Gallery?s Writer in Residence 2018 ? her exhibition ?BCE? (Whitechapel Gallery, January ? April 2019), draws on a year of performances and readings, culminating in two short creation myth films: one from the ancient past, originating with the Wayuu tribe in northern Colombia; the other from the distant future, made with Victoria Sin.0.
The following collection of essays could have had as a subtitleTowards a New Sophiology. Apart from the final essay, “Valentin Tomberg and Dostoevski,” all the other essays appeared (in this same order) as articles in the Starlight Journal of the Sophia Foundation of North America over the years 2014-2019. The production of these articles took place during the period that immediately followed the publication of O’Meara’s book, The Way of Novalis, and should be seen as an outgrowth from the Sophianic direction of that book. In these essays, slightly expanded from the articles, O’Meara elaborates on the Sophianic mission of the Foundation with reference to the main Master-Individualities to whom the Foundation has linked itself, notably Rudolf Steiner, Valentin Tomberg, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), as well as the Master Peter Deunov. However, other well-known individuals are also considered in some depth, including Vladimir Solovyov, Pavel Florensky, Sergius Bulgakov, Fyodor Dostoevski, Carl Jung, as well as some of the Master-artists of the Renaissance, most notably Michelangelo and da Vinci. Estelle Isaacson and Ita Wegman also assume a significant role in this collection.
