Meditations

A novel that deeply affected me when I was young is Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot.” In it, the central character utters one of the most memorable and mysterious lines in all…

After a light, all-night rain, the clouds cleared and the sun made a welcome appearance in the early afternoon. People got outside and into the parkland in droves, including me.…

The reaction to terrorist attacks by most people in the Western world has been to say, “we will not change; we will continue to live just as we have been…

After the slaughter in Paris I called a Portuguese friend in the Azores who had lived for nearly 20 years in California. We hadn’t talked in nearly half a year,…

If the events of recent days have demonstrated anything, it is that the Enlightenment ideals of human reason and rationality, which originated in France, cannot hold sway over the chaos…

For at least 100,000 years, since ‘modern man’ first emerged from Africa, humans have been as we are—tribal, self-centered and dominated by the separative, alienating-from-nature capabilities of so-called higher thought.

Questioner one: I’d like to begin our enquiry today with a statement by a local philosophy professor. He said, “Science and its method is the best available way to explain…

Recently I watched a documentary about a species of heron that had learned how to fish, but is unable to transmit that knowledge to its offspring. It raised the question:…