Reading Time: 4 minutes While I wait for my early morning exercise class, I listen to the chatter of yellow-breasted bichofué, and watch a city worker use a long husk of palm branch to sweep the night’s detritus from the square. On my warmup run, I tuned into a local news podcast, for analysis of the new president’s first […]
Meaning & Purpose
Posted inBooks
‘On Consolation’: Comfort for nonbelievers from great thinkers
Reading Time: 4 minutes As an omnivorous reader, I unconsciously categorize my books: the ones I quit partway through, those I finish but donate to a library, books I keep for repeat reads, and, top of the heap, the treasured titles I underline and dog ear, the better to savor and re-savor certain passages. Michael Ignatieff’s On Consolation belongs […]
Posted inTrue Story
When dissent meets disproportionate consequences
Reading Time: 6 minutes It was June 10th, 2022. My plane had just touched down in Los Angeles. The long travel day from Glasgow was finally over. I wasn’t thinking about dissent; I was thinking about a bed to sleep in. Scotland had given me a rough time. I had broken my leg in two places and was now struggling […]
Posted inCulture
It’s times like these when hope is hardest to find—and when it’s needed most
Reading Time: 6 minutes To be progressive and politically engaged this summer is to absorb one blow after another, with more in the offing. The demise of Roe v. Wade. Severe limits slapped onto the EPA’s ability to combat climate change through regulation of power-plant carbon emissions. The specter of Republican-dominated state legislatures being turned loose to administer federal […]
Posted inTrue Story
Wherever we might ‘sonder’, there are microcosms we will never know
Reading Time: 8 minutes Around 5 a.m. every day, a man in his late fifties boards a non-integrated bus just north of Medellín, which takes around 45 minutes in early morning traffic to reach his stop, a 20-minute walk to a plot of public space where he will set up shop for the morning and midday. A non-integrated bus […]
Posted inEthics
Is ‘sentientism’ really better in practice than humanism?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Imagine a world where all sentient beings – human or otherwise – have recognized and protected rights. That’s sentientism. But is it better?
Posted inFilm/TV
Is ‘A Quality of Mercy’ always the answer to a balance of terror?
Reading Time: 10 minutes There are two ways of watching the first-season finale of Strange New Worlds: either aware of its source material, from possibly the best episode of The Original Series, or… not. For those who know “Balance of Terror” (TOS, S1E8), you’ll probably find yourself marveling at how faithful “A Quality of Mercy” is to the former […]
Posted inFilm/TV
What makes a home for ‘All Those Who Wander’?
Reading Time: 8 minutes The first season of Strange New Worlds started with Captain Pike grappling with foreknowledge of a terrible fate that awaits him in Star Trek canon. Meanwhile, Spock this season has struggled with a relationship that The Original Series tells us is doomed. In both cases, SNW made the road to these futures feel uncertain in […]
Posted inParenting & Family
Do atheists just need a father figure?
Reading Time: 4 minutes A Christian scholar reports that Christians are Christian because they had good father figures and atheists are atheists because they had bad ones. Let’s explore the failures in this offensive claim.
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
More than halfway
Reading Time: 5 minutes Why people get midlife crises, and how humanism helps us age gracefully.