consciousness

The ancient debate between order and freedom seems to have been won by the proponents of personal freedom. But just as the old order of social conservatives and traditional religious…

How can a single, beautifully written sentence affect one’s entire being? Early this morning, as the sun rose, a line from Hamlet stopped me in my tracks. The beauty of…

A girl of about 9 slowly makes her way downstream from ‘the beach,’ a small spit of sand in the park at the adjacent site. Carrying a walking stick she…

It’s a rather gloomy day, the first cloudy day in weeks. It’s my birthday and the atmosphere mirrors my mood. As one grows older birthdays tend to be tinged with…

When I was a young man, an elderly friend uttered a quip that stuck: It’s not that the devil is smarter than everyone else; it’s that it has so much…

I read a good summation of the core beliefs of science this morning. I say beliefs because they are just that—unexamined premises often held subconsciously. It’s time they were questioned.

A reader wrote to say she “doesn’t have a clue” what I’m talking about when I speak of the movement of negation. Since I’ve come to feel that no one…

An American living much of the year in Mexico wrote asking me to “state my religious agenda.” I accept the challenge, but question its premise.