Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a gift, was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an id...
A hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the laws.
I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to kick...
Marriage is socialism among two people.
There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?
[N]o matter how much effort we expend, not everything is potentially within our control, not even our own bodies and minds.[...] The body - or, to use more cutting-edge language, the mindbody - is not...
When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where despite the recent proliferation of courses on 'happiness' and 'positive psychology,' the point is to acquire...
What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're really selling is your .
Our space was a home because we loved each other in it.
Just now and then, maybe every few weeks and then only for minutes at a time, a breach appeared in the partition and I walked on through, because I have always taken that as a general rule of life: If...
Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions....
De las cuatro mayores megaiglesias de Estados Unidos, tres difunden el evangelio de la prosperidad
At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless c...
As Eckhart, one of Otto's many sources, had asserted centuries earlier, referring to the Other as God, the religious seeker must set aside any idea about God as being good, wise, [or] compassionate.
My death is incidental, and I worry very much about my loved ones and, you know, would like to make it as easy as possible for them. Or wish I could will away whatever, you know, the sadness they will...
Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs though it's intimate and psychological-resistant to...
I have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that's really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it's very different. You're out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it...
Affordable.7
The scientific argument [...] is that the attribution of agency to the natural world was a mistake, although a useful one in an evolutionary sense. [...] [T]o the contrary, [...] it was the notion of...
The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, c...