About fifty years ago, a “stone age” tribe was discovered living in an isolated valley of Papua New Guinea. These people had virtually no contact with the outside world, no metal, no cooking vessels, no hearths.
Articles from December 2022
A facial reconstruction of Homo floresiensis • Cicero Moraes et al (CC BY 4.0)
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In the presence of the sacred
Last week I spent three days in Corvallis, Oregon, as a participant in a gathering celebrating “The Sacred in Nature.” I was invited by two of the conference organizers, philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore and poet Charles Goodrich, friends of nature and writers of exceptional grace.
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Birds do it. Bees do it. Even the blossoms in the trees do it.
Can a primrose be led down the primrose path?
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Frankenfoods?
We don’t hear much about genetically-modified (GM) food in the United States. Farmers produce it, massively. Consumers eat it without complaint. The big agribusiness corporations salt away the profits.
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Prayer of the heart
Last week the New York Times had a front page story on scientific tests of the efficacy of prayer. The gist of the story was that although much energy and money gone into testing the power of prayer, not much has come of it.
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Krispy Kreme nation
I’ve recently returned from the heartland, and I have one thing to report. Middle Americans are fat. Hugely, jeans-bustingly, roly-poly fat. The Bible Belt has busted its buckle.
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How to spend $500 billion on security
A few facts: Almost half of the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day.
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Musing on a sixty-eighth birthday
The reading glasses go on at forty. Sex drive starts slipping at fifty. Memory is a problem at sixty. I’m waiting to see what happens at seventy.
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The path to heaven doesn’t lie down in flat miles…
During my lifetime, America party politics have mostly turned on matters of class, money, and race. This year’s election is the first where the fault line between the parties is primarily religious.
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The mystery of life? I don’t know
Albert Einstein said, “Theories should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.”