...it's appalling to remember that the entire Oxford University Library was sold for scrap in the mid-1500s. Nor was that situation unique to Oxford, as libraries were deconstructed throughout the land.
Fracking is different. The risks of any single well are tiny compared to a nuclear power plant. But several hundred wells? Several thousand?
What really turns me on about technology is not just the ability to get more songs on MP3 players. The revolution - this revolution - is much bigger than that. I hope, I believe. What turns me on about the digital age, what excites me personally, is ...
Perhaps one of the most powerful things the contemporary church could do is to confess our sins to the world, the humbly get on our knees and repent for the terrible things we have done in the name of God.
Every time our government chooses to use military force to bring about change in the world, it once again teaches our children the myth of redemptive violence, the myth that violence can be an instrument for good.
If you have the gift of frustration and the deep sense that the world is a mess, thank God for that; not everyone has that gift of vision. It also means that you have a responsibility to lead us in new ways.
What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than t...
As Christians, we should be the best collaborators in the world. We should be quick to find unlikely allies and subversive friends, like Jesus did.
... all too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own. [2002] p.46
Their notion of training was to march the men up and down in parades and reviews: these were nice to look at and gave them the impression of military discipline and precision, but as a preparation for a modern war they had no value whatsoever.
A program of "disarmament," while imperialist antagonisms survive, is the most pernicious of fictions. Even if it were realized by way of general agreement - an obviously fantastic assumption!- that would by no means prevent a new war. The imperialis...
When the Viennese government compiled a Catalogue of Forbidden Books in 1765, so many Austrians used it as a reading guide that the Hapsburg censors were forced to include the Catalogue itself as a forbidden book.
The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.
The French revolution, he concluded, had not produced any new principles of truths, merely a mass of examples of how things could go wrong.
An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns.
As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice – there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of...
We're presently in the midst of a third intellectual revolution. The first came with Newton: the planets obey physical laws. The second came with Darwin: biology obeys genetic laws. In today’s third revolution, were coming to realize that even mind...
I believe that a revolution can begin from this one strand of straw. Seen at a glance, this rice straw may appear light and insignificant. Hardly anyone would believe that it could start a revolution. Nevertheless, I have come to realize the weight a...
We've got to search back to our last known safe landmark. I can't say exactly where, but I think it's back there at the start of the Industrial Revolution, we began applying energy in vast amounts to tools with which we began tearing the environment ...
We live in this era that has benefited from the Industrial Revolution, and we live with a kind of luxury and plenty that even all but the poorest of Americans live with a kind of sensuousness that was unimagined by medieval kings. But in order to get...
History reminds us that revolutions are not events, so much that they’re processes – that for tens of thousands of years, people have been making decisions that irrevocably shaped the world that we live in today; just as today, we are making subt...
