thoughts on life

A major American newspaper recently featured an article entitled, “A New Dark Age Looms.” Its tortured premise was that drastic climate change would cause humankind to lose “our foundation of…

Though the rain didn’t begin until nearly 10 this morning, by 3 pm the parkland had already returned to its creatures. A light drizzle, imperceptible in the wood, fell as…

On April 13th, Georgia executed Kenneth Fults, who pleaded guilty in 1997 to killing his 19-year-old neighbor, Cathy Bounds. One juror told an investigator, “Once he pled guilty, I knew…

There’s a lot of interest in human origins these days. A permanent exhibition, featuring more than 200 casts of pre-human and human fossils at the American Museum of Natural History…

I’m a columnist for the most important newspaper in the world. That makes me very important. Only now I’m not so sure I’m anything but a fading echo of a…

What need of churches when there of fields of orange poppies, and foothills framed by cumulus scudding across the sky? This isn’t a throwback to some druid-like philosophy, though the…

In 1784 Immanuel Kant, responding to a general challenge by a clergyman and official in the Prussian government, wrote an essay entitled, “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant’s essay had great and…

The word ‘diaspora’ comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “to scatter about.” Historically, it has referred to Jews living outside Israel. But we are all children of diaspora now,…