A great man is one who collects knowledge the way a bee collects honey and uses it to help people overcome the difficulties they endure - hunger, ignorance and disease!
- Nikola Tesla

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
- Franklin Roosevelt

While their territory has been devastated and their homes despoiled, the spirit of the Serbian people has not been broken.
- Woodrow Wilson

Katarina Miljković

Composer Katarina Miljkovic investigates interaction between science, music and nature through collaborative musical performance. This interest led her to the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot's essay The Fractal Geometry of Nature and self-similar complex structures resulting in the cycle, Forest, “…a dreamy piece, along the lines of Feldman or Brown, entirely captivating (Signal to Noise). Her generative music has been described as a refined, hypnotic dream (Danas) a work of musical and visual slow-motion with only a few delicately elaborated musical metaphors (Radio Belgrade), "ambient tone poem... that moved hypnotically through the sonic frame" (Lucid Culture).

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In collaboration with Wolfram Research, Miljkovic has been working on sound mapping of the elementary rules from Stephen Wolfram's New Kind of Science. She presented her exploration in this new field at NKS conferences in Waltham, MA, 2004, Washington, D.C., 2006, University of Vermont, 2007, Wolfram Technology Conference, Champaign, IL, 2005, The Musical and Scientific Legacies of Iannis Xenakis, 2006, Toronto, Cambridge Science Festival, 2009-2010, Boston Cyber Festival, 2007-20011, the International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music, 2007, Berlin, and Empirics, Computation, Mathematics, Science and Technology in Music and Acoustical Signal Analysis (ECMST ~ MASA), 2010, Berlin, Electronic Music Midwest, Chicago, IL, 2010, First Night, Boston, 2011.

Katarina Miljkovic's works have been performed at major music festivals in her native Yugoslavia, including the Belgrade Music Festivities, BEMUS, Music Biennale and World Festival of Chamber Music in Zagreb, the Rostrum of Yugoslav Music and, at the international festivals in Budapest, Romanische Sommer, Cologne and soundAxis, Toronto. Her Rondo, Sequence for String Orchestra was performed internationally by Belgrade String Orchestra in China, Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy, Russia, and Great Britain, at venues such as the Beijing Concert Hall, the Moscow Conservatory Big Concert Hall and the Bulgaria Symphony Hall. Miljkovic's work Swifts, for Symphonic Orchestra was performed by the Belgrade Radio Orchestra, the Athens Symphony Orchestra and broadcasted internationally. Her recent collaborative projects include works with Theater Dah from Belgrade, director Vlada Petric, Harvard University, Milan Popovic, video artist, Belgrade, choreographers Dawn Kramer and Stephen Buck, Boston, composer/performer Ko Ishikawa, Japan and percussionist, Peter Negroponte, NYC.

Miljkovic moved to Boston in 1992. She is faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music since 1996 and the recipient of the Louis Krasner and Lawrence Lesser award for excellence in teaching.

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Marko V. Jaric

Marko V. Jaric was born on March 17, 1952 in Belgrade. He completed his elementary school education in Belgrade and attended the Air Force Military High School in Mostar where he graduated in 1970 as the best student of his class. Subsequently he enrolled at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics where he received a degree in physics in 1974, graduating as the best student of his generation. He received his Ph.D. in 1978 at the City University of New York with professor Joseph Birman, one of the most prominent physicists in solid-state physics, as his thesis advisor.

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Sailors of the Sky

A conversation with Fr. Stamatis Skliris and Fr. Marko Rupnik on contemporary Christian art

In these timely conversations led by Fr. Radovan Bigovic, many issues are introduced that enable the contemporary reader to deepen and expand his or her understanding of the role of art in the life of the Church. Here we find answers to questions on the crisis of contemporary ecclesiastical art in West and East; the impact of Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract painting on contemporary ecclesiastical painting; and a consideration of the main distrinction between iconography and secular painting. The dialogue, while resolving some doubts about the difference between iconography, religious painting, and painting in general, reconciles the requirement to obey inconographic canons with the freedom essential to artistic creativity, demonstrating that obedience to the canons is not a threat to the vitatlity of iconography. Both artists illumine the role of prayer and ascetisicm in the art of iconography. They also mention curcial differences between iconography in the Orthodox Church and in Roman Catholicism. How important thse distinctions are when exploring the relationship between contemporary theology and art! In a time when postmodern "metaphysics' revitalizes every concept, these masters still believe that, to some extent, Post-Modernism adds to the revitatiztion of Christian art, stimulating questions about "artistic inspiration" and the essential asethetic categories of Christian painting. Their exceptionally wide, yet nonetheless deep, expertise assists their not-so-everday connections between theology, ar, and modern issues concerning society: "society" taken in its broader meaning as "civilization." Finally, the entire artistic project of Stamatis and Rupnik has important ecumenical implications that aswer a genuine longing for unity in the Christian word.

The text of this 94-page soft-bound book has been translated from the Serbian by Ivana Jakovljevic, Fr. Gregory Edwards, and Andrijana Krstic. Published by Sebastian Press, Western American Diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Contemporary Christian Thought Series, number 7, First Edition, ISBN: 978-0-9719505-8-0