“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me” — Meister Eckhart One of my earliest childhood memories was when I first became aware that I was fundamentally different from everyone else in my family. While my parents, brother, and sister all had…

“He who is the author of a war, lets loose the whole contagion of hell, and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.” –Thomas Paine (1778) In dire times such as these, I often revisit the words of Thomas Paine, a man whose impeccable moral clarity has resonated…

An evolutionary bottleneck is a metaphor used by evolutionary biologists to refer to an apparent acceleration of genetic variation in a species due to a catastrophic reduction in its population. Unlike the normal processes of natural selection, which are driven by “fitness” or the adaptive benefits of a given allele…

“There’s a great, big, beautiful tomorrow…” — Theme Song (from Disney) at the General Electric Pavilion, 1964 New York World’s Fair When I was 14, my mother drove my sister and me to the New York World’s Fair, in the Long Island suburbs, where — alongside the international exhibits, most…

[This is an article I wrote ten years ago, before I retired. I just found it on my computer, and it still makes sense to me, so here it is…] “Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.” –William Blake Whenever I teach excerpts from the Bible in…

Like most Americans, especially those of us in the suburban middle class, I live in a neighborhood of modest, comfortable private homes with (usually multiple) cars, trucks, vans, and occasionally boat trailers in their driveways and out front, with tidy and often attractive trees, shrubs, and flowerbeds set out, like…

One day many years ago, when I was dressing in the locker room at the University of Oregon, a young Christian fundamentalist approached me and tried his hook line on me: “I notice you are in good health today, after exercising, but do you ever wonder what will happen after…

For the past several years, I have made a practice of spending the Fourth of July — not gawking at the mindless entertainment of fireworks, nor cheering brass marching bands, nor hanging out and drinking beer at barbecues — but rather quietly contemplating (and thereby celebrating) the Declaration of Independence…

In his well-known essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell pointed out that the corruption of language goes hand in hand with the devolution of civil society into tyranny, whether “left” (communism) or “right” (fascism). …