The Doubting Thomas

topic C. in “imagining the reservation,” Alexie says “Survival = Anger x Imagination.” Using “The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire,” show how this formula works in the life of Thomas. How has he used his anger and his imagination to survive?

Thomas Kentouris is a Divisional Sales Leader for Techtronic Industries, North America and over the past two years has mastered the art of work life balance on the road. He shared some of his secrets to success in business and healthy travel for our Road Warrior Interview Series.

name is Cordaro Thomas; I received my Bachelor’s degree in the Paralegal Studies with a specializing in pre-law. After graduating with my bachelor’s degree, I worked for John Alleman Law Firm for a year. I am currently pursing my Master’s in Public Administration with a focus in Non-Profit Organization and Local Government. I have proven to be a man of determination, maturity and intelligence. I am currently a member of the Paul Simon Institute Ambassadors Program as well a member of Phi Rho Eta Fraternity Inc. I was born and raised on the Southside of Chicago, IL. After working for the law firm, I decided that I wanted to see a change in the policies and the day-to-day operation within the government. I plan to own and operate a non-profit

As in the words of Joseph J. Ellis, author of A Legacy of Myth and Contradiction, Thomas Jefferson was a "flawed great man." Jefferson's greatest flaw was the contradiction between his words and actions. For example, as the author of the Declaration of Independence, he stated that all men are created equal. This is negated by the fact that he owned many slaves of his own and refused to emancipate them. Jefferson might have been flawed as all great men are, but we cannot allow these flaws to cloud his influence on modern politics. He taught future presidents that the best way to manipulate people is to remind them that it is okay to have different opinions because everyone ultimately wants the same result. For instance, in 2007 President Obama promised he would completely remove troops from Iraq. This promise significantly boosted polls in Obama’s favor because the removal of Iraqi troops is a topic that more than half of the country agrees on. This relates back to Jefferson’s teaching because like Jefferson, Obama made a promise that

In the pages of the bible one can find an early answer to an ancient debate. Jesus appears before Thomas whom had doubted Jesus’s existence and says, “Because you have seen me, have you believed? Blessed are they who do not see, and yet believed.”(John 20:29). Jesus reveres those who were able to accept his existence without proof, while scorning Thomas for his doubt. The struggle between belief and doubt is seen throughout the course of history. The novel A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving also attempts to address the battle between these seemingly mutually exclusive principles. The novel centers around a boy named Owen Meany, who believes his future is predetermined for him by God. The protagonist is a man named John Wheelwright, who

Descartes's believed he could doubt everything that could be doubted, and the remainder was be the

In the late 1500s to early 1600s, philosophy experience the revival of radical skepticism because of the ideology of Michel de Montaigne. Skeptics held that men cannot agree on anything, and it is almost impossible to understand if something is true, since everything can be an opinion or an interpretation (Lecture 2, 2016). However, a man named René Descartes was determined to disprove skepticism by using skepticism itself (Stewart, Blocker, & Petrik, 2013). To disprove skepticism, Descartes first doubted everything he had ever learned or believed until he discovered something that was ridiculous to doubt (Stewart, Blocker, & Petrik, 2013). Descartes resolved to doubt the core foundations upon which all of his belief rested upon: sense experience and intellectual intuition (Stewart, Blocker, & Petrik, 2013). External world skepticism was one area that lead Descartes to write his famous essays, titled Meditations, and this topic

A mental illness people’s inner world is always mysterious and complicated that a normal healthy person could never fully explored. In this book, Your Fathers, Where are they? And the Prophets, Do they live forever? Dave Eggers successfully created such a psychotic young man(Thomas) who has some issues in his earlier life that have left him in some considerable pain and has been driven over the edge. In this story, he kidnapped seven people and isolated them in different rooms and asked them some big questions in order to figure out his life. Although Thomas constantly underscored that he is a moral man and would not harm any his captors, his action of kidnapping can still be a controversial topic. Seemingly, Thomas can be concerned as an irrational

Water has always been a great issue for Dallas, considering the fact that the population has grown exponentially since the late 1850s, growing from merely 678 people in 1860 to well over one million in population currently. Furthermore, as population grew, Dallas also spatially grew due to their power to keep acquiring more land and water resources as demand for both increased. Although Dallas no longer uses groundwater due to inefficient supply, the city did rely on groundwater in the beginning of its history. In the late 1850s, Browder Springs was privately owned by the Browder family, providing clean water to those living near, however, when it became clear that the increasing population needed an organization to effectively

Bigger Thomas was a troubled soul as you could tell from the beginning of the book. You could see that he always wanted to prove something to others, when he actually just needed to always prove something to himself. He felt angry by what society believed about him without getting to know him as a person. He got bullied everyday by society telling him what he was from a young age without actually getting the chance to figure it out himself. Overall as we have seen, society is the cause of a lot of controversy. Society can cause an excessive amount of damage to a person, but it can’t force you to murder.

Discovered in the twentieth century, The Gospel of Thomas was founded by peasants that were digging for fertilizer close to the village of Nag Hammadi, Egypt. The peasants revealed a container containing thirteen leather-bound manuscripts that were buried in the fourteenth century. The container contained fifty-two tractates that represented “heretical” writings of Gnostic Christians. Dated back to 200 A.D., there was not much known about the Gospel of Thomas besides that there were only three small fragments from Oxyrynchus. The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of literary works that contains 114 ‘opaque sayings’ of Jesus that were collected and written down by St. Didymus Jude Thomas, but nobody knows if St. Didymus Jude Thomas wrote the

However, the Meditator realizes that he is often convinced when he is dreaming that he is sensing real objects. He feels certain that he is awake and sitting by the fire, but reflects that often he has dreamed this very sort of thing and been thoroughly convinced by it. On further reflection, he realizes that even simple things can be doubted. Omnipotent God could make even our conception of mathematics false. One might argue that God is supremely good and would not lead Descartes to believe falsely all these things. He supposes that not God, but some "evil demon" has committed itself to deceiving him so that everything he thinks he knows is false. By doubting everything, he can at least be sure not to be misled into falsehood by this demon.

When analyzing Bigger Thomas, Richard Wright’s protagonist in the novel Native Son, one must take into consideration the development of his characterization. Being a poor twenty-year-old Black man in the south side of Chicago living with his family in a cramped one- bedroom apartment in the 1930’s, the odds of him prospering in life were not in his favor. Filled with oppression, violence, and tragedy, Bigger Thomas’ life was doomed from the moment he was born. Through the novel, Bigger divulges his own dreams to provide for his family and to be anything but a “nobody.” Although Bigger struggled to fight through obstacles to pursue his dreams for the future, his chase for a better life came to an abrupt

René Descartes was an extremely influential 17th-century philosopher and came up with many ideas that still persist to this day. One of those ideas was Cartesian skepticism, which states that “the view that we do not or cannot have knowledge in regard to a particular domain,” knowledge, in this case, is justified, true, beliefs. He first comes up with his idea of skepticism in the first part of his work “Meditations On First Philosophy,” aptly named “Of the things which may be brought within the sphere of the doubtful.” In his first meditation, he discusses his doubts with sensory illusion/error, possible dream states, and regarding deception by an evil demon. However, after dissolving his first two doubts, he gets stuck on the third and

     St. Thomas’ view was of God is an infinite, all-good, all-knowing, all powerful, perfect being who created the universe and now has sole command over it. This view is known as theism. St. Thomas states that a first cause must be in order to have cause and effect now. For if we take away the first cause there would be no effect following there for the universe would have never been created which is impossible because we can prove the universe does exist. He also argues that there are things in the universe that have the possibility of existing and not existing, we have seen things that have existed and than destroyed, thus proving that there is the ability of being and not being. There was a time when