As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a c...
It is most important for the practice of the Christian ministry, especially in its missionary activities toward those both within and without the Christian culture, to consider pagans, humanists, and Jews as members of the latent Spiritual Community ...
No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a l...
For a quarter-century British governments had tried and failed to combine economic growth, increased social service provision and a high level of employment. The second depended ultimately on the first, but when difficulty arose, the first had always...
Our Blessed Lord left the world without leaving any written message. His doctrine was Himself. Ideal and History were identified in Him. The truth that all other ethical teachers proclaimed, and the light that they gave to the world, was not IN them,...
The manner of 's death has a certain interest for psychologists. Shortly before it, he declared that it was necessary for him to sleep some ten minutes or a quarter of an hour longer each day than the preceding one: the day after he had thus reached ...
The message sent by this policy is that if women are to be accepted into the exclusive ranks of men, then they have to look like men: buttoned up, stuffy, and no-nonsense. As if to show a little cleavage, to highlight a curvaceous figure, or to in an...
We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the “French paradox,” for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder...
This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens ...
Yet the organic label itself—like every other such label in the supermarket—is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven’t t...
I will admit it sometimes felt strange to me to make the confession to someone and later catch them laughing, or flirting, or eating a sandwich, instead of tearing at the injustice of it all or sitting quietly at the center of a grand and monstrous g...
Sometimes there are things we don't understand even about ourselves. Sometimes we run out of the time to keep trying to unravel them, and we have to sit back and content ourselves with a shrug. But I think there are some things that we'd never unders...
The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at onc...
Perhaps the most overpowering contrast [with the West] is the virtual absence in premodern China of the idea of a transcendent creator God who is distinct from Nature in a fundamental qualitative sense. The Chinese had notions of a supreme god in var...
In politics, Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck. Daffy's always going berserk, jumping up and down, yelling. Bugs's got that sly smile, like he always knows what's up, like nothing can ruffle him.
Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it's necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great...
We humans have a questionable track record in our dealings with the environment. Recent studies show that complete restoration of Florida’s Everglades could take approximately 30 years and 7.8 billion dollars. There’s a lot of work to be done–b...
Even bullying was important to Wonder Woman, and in Sensation Comics #23 she stopped a gang who were picking on a young boy, showed the head bully the error of his ways and learned about his home situation, spoke to his father about his abusive tende...
Active or ambitious women were not only rare but often evil. Wonder Woman flipped this paradigm by embodying the strength, assertiveness, and independence usually associated with bad girls and villains in a positive heroic light. The Golden Age Wonde...
It is only when women start to organize in large numbers that we become a political force, and begin to move towards the possibility of a truly democratic society in which every human being can be brave, responsible, thinking and diligent in the stru...
A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, 'can become the thread of a plot, connecting moments and incidents into a narrative. The narrative structure might be a simple chain of events...
