Yet again my students prove they cannot listen—that simply hearing is beyond them. They must be distracted because otherwise they might actually start thinking about something in the world around them, or, worse yet, they might start thinking about something in the past or something in the world that is not immediately around them, maybe [...]
Despite what my conservative friends say, I actually cleave to few radical notions, but one idea that they and their moderate brethren would consider pretty offensive follows. If we are to survive as a nation, as an economy, as a civilization, perhaps even as a species, we need to have an almost complete reversal in [...]
To a large degree, the war in Iraq is an imaginary war. Truly and tragically, it is causing literal suffering for the tens of thousands of Americans wounded or killed and the millions of Iraqis killed, wounded, or made refugees. But the purpose of this war, its results and its goals, exist largely inside the [...]
In his book God’s Universe, the astrophysicist Owen Gingerich takes the biologist E.O. Wilson to task for placing humankind within natural processes and not as their end. If it’s a leap for Wilson to say that man is not nature’s purpose, then it’s as much of a leap–or more–for Gingerich to make the connection between [...]
I’ve been thinking a whole lot lately about the old adage “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” The historian of religion Karen Armstrong would say that this saying is an indication of the tension between mythos and logos—the eternal ideal vs. the practical real.
And while I’m sure that’s [...]The Roberts Court would appear to be contradicting itself when it ruled both for the First Amendment in the case from Wisconsin Right to Life’s airing political ads in violation of McCain/Feingold but against it in the Alaska teen’s right to unfurl a “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner across the street from a school [...]
Virginia Woolf’s notion of a “room of one’s own” in which women could be freed from the responsibilities of domestic life had a good deal of resonance when she postulated it in the first half of the 20th Century. It could easily be argued that women, who still perform the bulk of housework, still need [...]