There were many good reasons for the Spy to want to interview Stephyn Butcher. One was to talk to the Johns Hopkins professor about his work in “swarm intelligence,” which is used with games programming, machine learning, software engineering, and statistics.
Another would have been his board member roles with the Dorchester Center for the Arts or Main Street Cambridge.
Or the more simple one was related to why Stephyn, and his husband, Michael Kingan, decided to leave their urban life for the slower-paced Eastern Shore a few years ago.
But in the end, and in keeping with our interest in spirituality as the Mid-Shore celebrates such holidays as Chanukah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa, we saw the need to talk to Stephyn about his role as an ordained Zen priest as Rev. Jushin Stephyn Butcher.
In our Spy chat, Stephyn talks about Buddhism’s general foundation, how its many forms differ from Western faiths, its relationship to evil, and the benefits of practice and patience in absorbing its benefits in one’s being.
This video is approximately six minutes in length.
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