<div>They called my generation of teenagers 'juvenile delinquents' – mainly because of our'wild and crazy' music. Drugs weren’t a major problem in the mid-1950’s, and the 'sexual revolution' hadn’t started. I’m not saying we didn’t think about sex – we sure did, a lot – but the 'respectable' girls knew how to say NO – at least with me...</div>
<div>Extreme inequality is the sometimes mentioned but not well seen elephant in the room. Mostly noted and then ignored, it continues its 45-year explosion, especially in the US and UK without pause or concerted opposition. How extreme is it?...</div>
<div>What we cannot speak about we must indicate with sighs, shouts, grunts, tears, and shrieks...</div>
<div>Cogito, ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. Over and over again. Descartes was driven to the extremity of his wits, desperate to prove to himself that the external world existed, and that such certainty came with a sense of personal agency within that world. Once again, he fell back on Plato’s allegory of the cave: not for him is that which is what it appears to be!</div>
<div>The human brain specializes in figuring things out. But, after thirty thousand years of homo sapiens inquiry, countless cosmic mysteries remain – God, gravity, the electron, black holes, dark matter, etc. Not least of all, we have yet to understand the instrument of our understanding: the mind itself and its two dimensions: Consciousness and Unconsciousness...</div>
‘How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy’, a new book by John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato, is a well-written and insightful examination of a central question in international relations: are states actually rational actors? That is, does the empirical record show that they are routinely rational or routinely non-rational? The issue is crucial for both the study and practice of international politics and the authors make the case that “only if states are rational can scholars a
<div>Homer’s gods can roar with laughter. Zeus, Hera, Poseidon and the rest of the cabal — grinning, giggling, splitting their sides. Anything man can do, the gods can do better. The Greek pantheon is a projection of the terrestrial on to the celestial. It’s only when God becomes man that he stops laughing. Jesus doesn’t do stand-up. There are no gags in the Bible, no guffaws or gales of laughter. The Christian faith is an awfully serious thing...</div>
<div>For most of human history our conceit has ordained that animals exist for us, to do with them as we please. We employ them for sport, entertainment, experiments, and work; their lives are crushed by inhumane methods of slaughter, transport, battery farming, and more. Their legal status in most countries differs little from a chair or a table...</div>
<div>In the brief essay 'Catholics,' from his first book of nonfiction, Living Up the Street (1985), prolific Chicanx poet and author Gary Soto depicts himself as an elementary school student in a parochial school 'standing in a waste basket for fighting on the day we received a hunger flag for Biafra'...</div>
<div>One Friday night, over the dark tides of the Seine, the river that cuts through the body of Paris, the ancient city of Catholic and secular faith, a metal horse with a rider on it appeared. It came from the Pont d'Austerlitz, galloping toward the Eiffel Tower. Water poured out that night, horizontally from above as rain and vertically from below as a river...</div>
Psychology urges that we are never so authentic as when we encounter the self; philosophy counsels that we are never so modern as when we ponder the self. Might one then speak of a perspective that sees the self as both authentic and modern? These two disciplines seem to speak with two distinct voices. And the insistence of early twenty-first century society on specialization seems to encourage the segregation of one from the other. Indeed, we live in a culture that accords status only to the s
<div>As history’s pendulum swings once again, ominously, towards the political far-right, the iconic, enduring symbols of democracy take on a fresh significance...</div>
Tension between the people and their leaders is a theme in democratic history because it is rooted in human nature. Large groups of people ('The People') can be fickle. Recognition of this condition preoccupied the signers of the Declaration of Independence. They wanted to tie government purposes to a protection of 'natural rights' of individual liberty. So, too, did the Framers of the Constitution, who wanted to insulate subsequent generations from the unceasing struggles of 'factions'—struggle
<div>How is it that the Old Testament (OT) seems to predict the coming of Christ? Was the OT inspired by the God revealed in the New Testament (NT)? Could be, but an answer internal to the Bible itself is persuasive...</div>
<div>We moved mostly during the day. They moved at night. So we set our ambushes at night, and they during the day...</div>
<div>Man is locked in his physical and digital cell, blinded by the lights, as the singer sings, with that deep, Kafkaesque, not fully conscious sense of being completely alone in a 'cold and empty city of sin,' with no one around to judge him,' but in fact only alone and judged. Judged not by people like him - that wouldn't solve the problem of evil - but by technology, an increasingly autonomous creature of the human mind...</div>
<div>I first read The Gulag Archipelago during my first year in Israel, where I eventually settled. I remember feeling that here was something powerful and new...</div>
<div>I am called back to the too little acknowledged problem of adult/minor sex in the works of Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez...</div>
<div>Science, philosophy, and culture – are these separate magisteria, or can there be beneficial cross-fertilization? This question may be considered almost as old as civilization itself...</div>
Nina Berberova was unhappy whenever her Italics Are Mine was called a memoir. She would insist that her book was an autobiography—and not merely insist but do everything in her power to cement this specific genre definition in the reader’s consciousness. The word “autobiography” is in the subtitle of Italics, and the first sentence of the first chapter also says that “this book is not reminiscences” and explains in detail wherein the difference lies between the two genres...