Meditations

On a day that was expected to be sunny here in northern California, a thick layer of clouds sits over the land. A silent, solemn atmosphere pervades, and it feels…

“I was shocked to the core when I heard about the killings of 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo,” writes a professor of cultural history in London. He…

Readers of this column know I have a fascination with time, both physical and psychological. Neither is what we think it is, what our everyday, commonsense experience assumes. Most importantly,…

Workers had just painted the lines on the new college track. A podunk little school in California’s agricultural Central Valley, I finally got my undergraduate degree there at 33. I…

Twenty-five years ago, in early January 1990, I was in Moscow on a mission. Driven by the certainty of the simultaneous collapse of the USSR and the US (Americans are…

“60 Minutes,” one of America’s last remaining bulwarks of the status quo, devoted a full fawning hour to Pope Francis Sunday, between Christmas and New Years. Can this media-canonized pope…

Descartes was wrong. He should have said: I think, and therefore I am divided. Then perhaps the world would not be so divided between East and West, North and South,…

For me, the clearest, deepest and I think truest portrait of Jesus came in the form of an elderly Chinese Buddhist woman who had barely escaped the throes and woes…