User:PaulSank

In August 2015, I got a little job editing Wikidelphia. Wikidelphia was in need of someone to pay attention to the whole project in a sustained, overseeing way and help expand it more than its busy progenitor Stan Pokras can do by himself.

One experience that qualifies me to do this job is that I started and have been gradually expanding another reference source. It's called Study Love, and it's about what I consider, and what many Near Death Experiencers call, the most important force in the universe: spiritual love. The site is large, detailed, well-organized, and easy to use, just as we want Wikidelphia to be.

Since 2011, I have volunteered at many events throughout the Phila-NJ area. For example:

• Macy's Family Fun Days at the African American Museum in Philadelphia.
• Philadelphia Reading Olympics, a multi-day, multi-venue annual event where you can ask kids questions like on Jeopardy or just keep score.
• West Park Arts Fest.
• Brides Against Breast Cancer bridal shows, where I've done various tasks from registration to truck loading.
• Mount Laurel Harvest Fest.
• Maple Shade Holiday Festival.

Something else I do on my personal time, since 2009, is to provide five daily Twitter news-and-views services where I find and share headlines and links relevant to poverty, malaria, the fruit of the Spirit, linguistics, and finally a topic too controversial to mention here.

A larger part of any bio of me would have to be Life-Net News & Radio:

Life-Net News was a newsletter, sometimes monthly, sometimes weekly, sometimes printed. I selected stories from the press and elsewhere about poverty, without regard to political angle, because if we always attack poverty from the same political vantage point--left, right, or whatever--we'll never win. I compressed the stories down much smaller than the original, making them more quickly readable yet just as informative. Life-Net News ran for 14 annual volumes.

Along with Life-Net News, from 1998 to 2010, I made a radio show, Life-Net Radio, a densely packed, fully layered, professional-sounding production. Again, the idea was to find guests from as many vantage points as possible in order to gain real understanding that transcends any political, religious, or philosophical angle. I started the show with the belief that I had received a call from God, and I did the show "in the name of Jesus" on radio station WTMR-AM in Camden. Guests included atheists, Lutherans, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, charity CEOs, activists, Communists, Greens, Socialists, etc. Notably, I don't feel certain that I ever found a Republican, and the gay community didn't seem interested, either. I produced over 540 new episodes.

In 2008, I received the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of many thousands of hours of volunteer service. From 2007 to 2014, I had a job doing clerical work, website maintenance, flier creation, operations reports, and various other tasks at Nonprofit Technology Resources.

I've been married to Vicky since 1988. She's my first and only wife. My advice for marital longevity is to rule out divorce as an option, which in my own case was helped by heeding 1 Corinthians 7. If you don't maintain a commitment to your marriage, how can you be sure you'll maintain commitments to anything else?

We have a beautiful Eskimo-Chihuahua dog, Pixie. We have lots of squirrel and bird friends because we feed them premium seed, suet, and peanuts.

My wife likes to follow what goes on at NASA, and so do I. It's incredible, all the things they're doing! Maybe you thought the last Space Shuttle trip was the end of anything interesting, but no, they have lots of missions and experiments happening all the time. The Pluto mission is just a major highlight among many other fascinating activities.

My religious affiliation is Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), a Bible-believing denomination that disagrees a lot with the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA). The PCA's beliefs are summarized in the Westminster Confession.

Some of my favorite sayings are:

• "There's always something to do." Thanks to pizza man Matt at the Italian Pavilion.
• "Where there's God's will, there's a way." Where there's only your own will, there may or may not be a way.
• "The righteous man knows and cares about the cause of the poor; the wicked has no such concern." Proverbs 29:7, the key verse of Life-Net News & Radio.

Sometime in the early 1980s, I first met Stan. I volunteered in his Public Interest Media office, organizing, filing the influx of paper, much of which I found fascinating. I remember "multilogues", Winged Mercury, the Hamaker-Weaver Hypothesis, the Whole Earth Catalog. I'm still involved with something I discovered there: The Glass Plate Game, invented by Dunbar Aitkens of Corvallis, Oregon. It's a sociable, playable attempt to realize the fictional Glass Bead Game from Hermann Hesse's Nobel Prize-winning novel Magister Ludi.

Over the next few years, I got more involved with Stan's Other Networks Newsletter, the final issue of which I took a lot of responsibility for, as if it were "my baby".

In my teenage years, I hitchhiked through all 48 states. I started by hitching from Collings Lakes, NJ, to Pascagoula, MS, winding it up a few years later going up Mount Washington in NH. Other favorite stops were Glenwood Springs (CO), San Rafael Swell (UT), Freeport (TX), Yellowstone National Park (WY), Spokane (WA), Paseo del Rio (TX), Beartooth Pass (MT), Bar Harbor (ME), Brock's Books (TX).

What would I want on my tombstone?

J P SANK
STUDYLOVE.ORG

Note: Throughout this bio, I have avoided saying "I am" anything. Long ago, from an insightful book called Compassion and Self-Hate, I learned to shy away from that when I can.

Paul, thanks for writing up your personal experience at the Franklin Institute!  Stan 17:31, 7 March 2011 (EST)