thoughts on life

There was a time when truth-telling meant something, even on TV’s nightly news. But “speaking truth to power” has become a hollow cliché. After all, challenging readers to think and…

Bonobos look like graceful versions of chimpanzees. They are entirely tree dwelling, don’t make tools, or primitive war, or engage in hunting monkeys for meat as chimpanzees do. In other…

Fifteen meters upstream, a merganser mother preens on the rocks as her three chicks play in the shallows of the creek. Out of the water she appears quite large, irrespective…

We like to think we are individuals, especially in the West. Indeed, individualism is largely an unseen and unquestioned ideology.

Nothing shows the limits of science and the scientific method more than recent studies of awe in human beings. Following the tiresome trend of hypothesizing on the evolution of every…

Are Catholics, or members of any religious group who pick and choose what church teachings and decrees to follow, still Catholic? The question goes to the heart of ethnic and…

You know things are bad in the West when many people, of many faiths, turn to the head of the patriarchal, corrupt, antediluvian Roman Catholic Church (RCC) for moral guidance.…

It’s said that after 50 years of teaching, only two of the Buddha’s pupils, Sariputta and Mogallanna, really understood him. Yet from that small beginning came a creative explosion, one…