When I was 17, I had an experience that I later learned could be called a 'mystical experience.' It was almost violent. No faces, voices, nothing like that. It is like the world burst and flamed into life all around me. That is not a great image, but...
Perhaps the more benign and poetic sense of God is established when we are babies in the moments of primal joy we might call 'the epiphanies of infancy' - the sensation of being blissfully held and feeling complete and at one with everything - yet ha...
Ever since I've been blessed with success, I've struggled a little with anonymity and even family. I've had people calling asking for money, and I have to ask them first, 'Are you working? Have you been trying to help yourself?' Then I feel like I ca...
It makes sense that we came up with our public school system during the Industrial Revolution because it's like everybody is a factory worker, eating their terrible food and going back to the room where you're silent and listening to an idiot. That's...
Since the Renaissance, a concept called 'progress' has been baked into our society. Progress - founded on an accumulation of knowledge through experience (and in the case of science, through experiment). To build on the past rather than endlessly rel...
I cook a little bit. I make a Hungarian dish called chicken paprikash that's out of this world. I'll give a heads-up to all of your readers that it doesn't have to be between Thai and Mexican every night. Toss some Hungarian in every once in a while....
Out of the Slow Food movement has grown something called the Slow Cities movement, which has started in Italy but has spread right across Europe and beyond. And in this, towns begin to rethink how they organize the urban landscape so that people are ...
I did a show a long, long time ago called 'Cooking Mexican'. It was a studio show as opposed to on-location like the one I do now. Before my first show, I was a cooking instructor, and I did a whole lot of classes for home cooks about Mexican food.
We created a line of pet food called Nutrish that's made to human standards, and 100 percent of the proceeds go to animal rescue. One of our top-tier donors is the ASPCA, and they help us challenge animal shelters all across the country to get more a...
We'd go out in Larry's hippie van and drive out all around Dallas. He loved Chinese food, he'd go in and say. Remember me Major Nelson, me and my friends here are making this show called Dallas, have you got a table for us? It would work every time.
That President Mohammad Khatami's policies have been blocked is the bitterest incident in the contemporary Iranian history. This means that the wishes of millions of people who voted for Khatami and called for freedom and justice have been ignored......
I used to work for an NGO called Transitions Online, and I was their Director of New Media. I was a very idealistic fellow who thought that he could use blogs, social networks and new media to help promote democracy, human rights and freedom of expre...
In the greater number of cases that have come under my observation, freedom has been a serious misfortune to the manumitted slave, and he has most commonly brought upon himself privations and sufferings which he would not have been called on to endur...
I came from a poor family, so working and going to school at the same time was natural. It taught me multi-tasking, although we didn't call it that back then. I learned I could never be idle, I need to be doing many things at once.
As a follower of Jesus, I am called to work for justice and reconciliation, and to be an advocate for those who cannot speak for themselves. I plan to focus my future work on human rights and religious freedom - both domestic and international - as w...
From the time I was 3, I wanted to be a major-league player. To accomplish that at 35, get my name on my jersey, be in the clubhouse with major-league players, see my family for the first time in three months, be in my home state and pitch the day I ...
All the women that are first born daughters in my family are named Mary, but we've all been given nicknames. I don't know how or why that started, but I'm nicknamed after my great-grandmother, who was Mamie. No one ever calls me Mary, except only if ...
Marriage of attraction is a gamble anyway, so you might as well marry into a family that is similar to your own, and make that much less of an adjustment. But the 'love marriage', as it is called, is equally common in India now. But it would be inter...
I love Matthew Broderick. Call me crazy, but I love him. We can only be in the marriage we are. We're very devoted to our family and our lives. I love our life. I love that he's the father of my children, and it's because of him that there's this who...
Beauty does not linger; it only visits. Yet beauty's visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm; it calls us to feel, think and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful. A life without delight is on...
Now we have technology where we can modify the genomics of individuals by gene transfer and genetic meddling, we may find that people will want to modify their children, enhance their intelligence, their strength and their beauty and all the other so...