And now, as I close my task, subduing my desire to linger yet, these faces fade away. But one face, shining on me like a Heavenly light by which I see all other objects, is above them and beyond them all. And that remains. I turn my head, and see it,...
Ah, but it is an interesting thing, that these things can so seldom be proved. If I were to perform some piece of, hrmf, magic for you, here in this room, you would claim a thousand ways it could have been done. Indeed, those ways might be exceedingl...
One retired pastor, who felt that he was being called to write a book about homosexuality, interviewed me. He said he wanted his book to be pastorally compassionate toward gay people while exhorting the church to remain firm in holding to a tradition...
We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the ...
You end up with a machine which knows that by its mildest estimate it must have terrible enemies all around and within it, but it can't find them. It therefore deduces that they are well-concealed and expert, likely professional agitators and terrori...
There was nothing wrong with having an expensive home, nothing wrong at all. There’s a pride in building something up, working hard to achieve something. But it shouldn’t have been his manhood that increased with each new success, it should have ...
One morning indeed, I felt a sudden misgiving that she not only had left the house but had gone for good: I had just heard the sound of a door which seemed to me to be that of her room. On tiptoe I crept towards the room, opened the door, stood upon ...
The stakes involved in Washington policy debates are often so high-- whether we send our young men and women to war; whether we allow stem cell research to go forward-- that even small differences in perspective are magnified. The demands of party lo...
Recall the metaphor I used in chapter 4 relating the random movements of molecules in a gas to the random movements of evolutionary change. Molecules in a gas move randomly with no apparent sense of direction. Despite this, virtually every molecule i...
The evening I went for a walk. To walk for the sake of walking is something I seldom do.Inside my apartment I'd felt inexplicably anxious. I needed to talk to someone, to be reassured. Or perhaps I needed to confess my sin: I was once again having im...
But ultimately there comes a moment when a decision must be made. Ultimately two people who love each other must ask themselves how much they hope for as their love grows and deepens, and how much risk they are willing to take. It is indeed a fearful...
Why could Tolkien not be more like Sir Thomas Malory, asked [Edwin] Muir, in the third Observer review of those cited above, and give us heroes and heroines like Lancelot and Guinevere, who ' knew temptation, were sometimes unfaithful to their vows,'...
Repotting a plant gives it space to grow. Repotting ourselves means taking leave of our everyday environments and walking into unfamiliar territory—of the heart, of the mind and of the spirit. It isn’t easy. The older we get, the more likely we a...
For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop...
Over and over these organizations tell America that family, above all, is what Christianity is about. Devotion to one's family is, indeed, a wonderful thing. Yet it is hardly something to brag about. For all except the most pathologically self-absorb...
What indeed is the half-life of a mortal consciousness? What is the half-life of a memory of that mortal consciousness? Of course, this is purely an academic question and of no immediate concern to those of us existing in the world of the living, for...
The Mommy Mystique tells us that we are the luckiest women in the world -- the freest, with the most choices, the broadest horizons, the best luck, and the most wealth. It says we have the knowledge and know-how to make "informed decisions" that will...
Prolific libraries take on an independent existence, and become living things...We may have chosen its themes, and the general pathways along which it will develop, but we can only stand and watch as it invades all the walls of the room, climbs to th...
Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is...
See, the institutions and specialist, experts, you see. Yes, yes, experts, indeed. See, they would have us believe that there is an order to art. An explanation. Humans are odd creatures in that way. Always searching for a formula. Yes, a formula to ...
By calling into question the very ideal of a universal, autonomous reason (which was, in the Enlightenment, the basis for rejecting religious thought) and further demonstrating that all knowledge is grounded in narrative or myth, Lyotard relativizes ...
