The quote below comes from my Netherlands friend, the poet and psychiatric nurse Aad de Gides.  (He is not “English as a Second Language,” but maybe as Fourth or Fifth Language and I find the irregularities charming, so will not edit.) ungraspable suffering rains through the human affairs.easily this could be a core denominator for the human condition.maybe paradoxically...

We’re living in some nasty times.  Conservatives accuse liberals of empathy, as though it’s a bad thing.  That’s already one of those You-can’t-make-this-shit-up things.  We hear some sane news commentators and saner comics attacking Glenn Beck’s outrage-du-jour.  Everyone to the left of Genghis Kahn has noticed that Faux News has moved beyond car-crash journalism...

Let’s grant the creationists this much: on the face of it, the story of evolution isn’t terribly flattering. We evolved most recently from apes, much earlier from fish (human fetuses, like all vertebrates, have gill slits in early stages of development, reminders that all life, including ours, came originally from the sea). Before that, we came from single-celled animals,...

The radical transformations of Western Christianity from about 1800 to today can be seen as three acts in an unfinished play.   Act One was staged against the background of the ancient three-story universe that was assumed by those who wrote the Bible, and still believed by most of our country’s founders in the late 1700s.  That ancient universe was a small, local...

Using the words “Science” and “Salvation” in the same breath needs some preparation so people in both camps don’t hyperventilate.  “Science” means “knowledge.”  It can’t guarantee that the knowledge is good, or that it will still be considered true in a year.  “Salvation” can mean “to save,” or to make healthy and whole (with its connection...