The realization that God could be female required the consideration that the Devil could be also.
At its most basic, the allure of fundamentalism, whether religious or ideological, liberal or conservative, is that it provides an appealing order to things that are actually disorderly.
A market economy is to economics what democracy is to government: a decent, if flawed, choice among many bad alternatives.
The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has 'civilized' us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish.
I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines.
In a basic agricultural society, it's easy enough to swap five chickens for a new dress or to pay a schoolteacher with a goat and three sacks of rice. Barter works less well in a more advanced economy. The logistical challenges of using chickens to b...
The girl who climbed up the water tower. We would have counted her an accident until the medical examiner found breaks and fractures from her hips to her heels. "You fall head first," he said. "Feet first's a jump.
What, in nature," Kit asked, "is the most beautiful thing you've seen? Or the most terrible?" "The Dismals," Giles answered promptly. "A beautiful aberration in the lay of the land--North Alabama. A section mysteriously lowered, strewn with boulders,...
I find most 'sacred music' pretty dismal.
Once she even successfully argued on behalf of my older brother, Dan, getting a BBGun, a weapon which he promptly turned against his younger siblings, outfitting us in helmet and leather jacket and instructing us to run across Eaton Park while he pra...
It's a dismally lonely business, writing.
The winter will be long and bleak. Nature has a dismal aspect.
The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.
I think there comes a time in every persons life where they just need to go to the darkest, most dismal place.
Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.
When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.
Even the most dismal and hopeless-sounding Wilco music, to my ears, has always maintained a level of hope and consolation.
Iran has a dismal record on human rights.
Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
I don't want to go out hunting for dismal topics to write about.
I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse.
