Meditations

Every week now it seems, astronomers are making a new mind-blowing discovery or observation. Black holes tearing apart stars that come too close; galaxies flickering on just after the “Dark…

A flock of small birds lands in the shallows, and a few begin furiously beating their wings in the water. More join in, and suddenly there are a dozen birds…

“The greatest achievement of the devil in the modern age is convincing people that he doesn’t exist.” I don’t know who said that, but it rings true with almost funereal…

For many years, I thought the American vice (which most of my countrymen still call a virtue) of having things both ways sprang from the mind of Alexander Hamilton, not…

Lately I’ve been grappling with the distinction between necessity and need. What is the difference between them, and can one see the dissimilarity as need and necessity present themselves?

It’s summer in northern California. People cross the iron footbridge on bikes or foot on a hazy, warm Sunday afternoon. I sit about 75 meters upstream from the bridge, and…

Overhanging the gorge are great angular outcroppings of volcanic rock—solid and sharp-edged protrusions from some long-ago eruption of Lassen or some other volcano in the area.

The word ‘dialogue’ is so overused and misused that it is no longer useful. Too many people mean too many things by the term. I prefer the word enquiry (‘inquiry’…