Recently in an airport, I saw and bought a rather provocative issue of Scientific American. The cover declared that humans ‘evolved’ to exercise, while the most similar forms of life – chimpanzees and bonobos – function very well as couch potatoes, according to […]
In addition to the NIMBYs and the YIMBYs, we now have the PHIMBYs: Public Housing in My Back Yard. This new acronym represents those who believe that public-subsidized housing should be added to our cities, but no private enterprise market-rate […]
For a long time, we have spoken of elections, in which a President is not on the ballot, as ‘off-year elections’. I think the Founders would have been horrified by such a notion. The Congress, they would have thought, should […]
In C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock, in the essay “Miracles” we read this: The experience of a miracle in fact requires two conditions. First, we must believe in a normal stability of Nature, which means we must recognize […]
Is there an appropriate place for icons in the 21st Century Protestant Church? There’s nothing new about the debate regarding sacred images and iconography, but I’ve gained some recent insights on the subject. In chapter 13 of Diarmaid McCullough’s work, Christianity: […]
The tithe has been a matter of controversy in Jewish and Christian circles, I assume, since it was first promulgated. [Islam, instead of 10% of income, proposes a contribution of 2.5% of one’s wealth per year.] Early in my Christian […]
We do not often think that Jesus Christ and the New Testament justifies capitalism. To the extent that capitalism means greed and self-indulgence, I should think not! Greed and self-indulgence are root human sins and will be manifested in any […]
In our time, politics and culture are increasingly oriented to the national scale on the one hand, and the immediate neighborhood on the other. A book, The Increasingly United States, by Daniel J. Hopkins, highlights this. However, in my view, besides […]
The United States has always been somewhat ambiguous about whether its primary loyalty was to the European Western World or to the Western Hemisphere (i.e., the Americas). The Founders thought of themselves as upholding the rights of Englishmen, which they […]
I always thought of Dick Dale as a local phenomenon, but his recent death got national coverage. The most thorough and best article was one in The New Yorker, a magazine which might well have turned up its nose during […]