Sometimes it is hard to tap into our spiritual selves or find time to nurture our intellectual curiosity. Here is a section that reflects on some nourishing materials from around the web and related media channels in order to get us thinking, get us feeling, and get us reflecting on the lives we are living in this big, beautiful world. **Some Adult/Mature Themes May Appear in Links and Other Attached Material**

Viking – Muslim Relations, ca.800 CE

This is the kind of thing that makes you re-thinking many of the assumptions you might have about how separated and isolated people have been throughout history. The vikings for example are an exemplar of the lonely Northerner who was more likely to discover Greenland than any other people. And yet, consider this artefact from the 9th century, CE. It is a ring, belonging to a viking and discovered not far from Stockholm. It is written in Arabic and reads “For Allah.” It testifies to the fact that Viking agents had reached at least the Abassaid empire during a period in which travel and communication were exceptionally challenging. In other words, this ring tells us that the world has been more complicated, more overlapping, more intricate and more religiously diverse than we can ever imagine.

And if that isn’t a HUGE thing to learn from so small an artefact as this, just imagine how much more is out there learn!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Allan T. Georgia, M.Div., M.T.S., PhD