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 […]
Meaning & Purpose
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.
Posted inCulture
Let’s take vacation seriously—by actually taking it
Reading Time: 3 minutes We need it. We deserve it. But research shows we usually don’t take all that we have coming to us. And if we do there’s a good chance we spend much of it responding to work messages, ruminating over office problems, and experiencing all the attendant stress. As summer sets in—prime season for getting away […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
The work we do, with the time we have
Reading Time: 6 minutes When I was a wee sprog, I dreamed big. I was going to be a physics professor, working on tricky cosmology problems related to heat and expansion. (I was the precocious twit reading Feynman and Hawking at twelve and, like any twelve-year-old, feeling confident that I understood everything because I’d read a few pop-sci texts.) […]
Posted inEthics
Against perfectionism
Reading Time: 6 minutes To be human is to be a work in progress. Human beings grow, change, and fail. That’s why we need compassion and forgiveness. We ought to give people a break, show some patience, and stop scolding one another. No one is perfect. This goes for other people and ourselves. But we remain strangely wedded to […]
Posted inFilm/TV
‘Memento Mori’: To live with the prospect of death (Strange New Worlds)
Reading Time: 9 minutes Like any self-respecting Trekkie, I learned the basics of gunpower from Star Trek: The Original Series. One of TOS‘s most memorable scenes comes from “Arena” (Season 1, Episode 18), when Captain Kirk, trapped on a planet with minimal resources, has to use his wits to survive an encounter with a brutish reptilian species called the […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
There is no ‘crisis of meaning’
Reading Time: 3 minutes Over 80 million. That’s how many hits a Google search for “crisis of meaning” generates in the past year alone. It makes sense that “crisis of meaning” would be in people’s minds. We are worried, and with good reason. Here in the US, the pandemic saw a surge in anxiety, depression, and other mental health […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
There is a secular afterlife
Reading Time: 4 minutes My family church here in Indonesia offers an online Bible study. One day, at my parents’ request, I helped them navigate to the page. The theme of the day was “Being brave facing death.” In support, a common proverb was offered: urip mung mampir ngombe—”Life is just stopping by to drink.” The proverb invites us […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
The joy of walking
Reading Time: 3 minutes Walking is good for the environment. It is also good for the body and the soul. A recent study suggests that walking may slow the aging process. But walking is not merely a tool for longevity. It is also an instrument of spiritual health. An MIT study found that walking increased markedly during the COVID-19 pandemic, often in response […]