It has happened to me only twice. Each time, only a single word was spoken. But the impact of hearing someone who isn’t there speak to you is profoundly unsettling, even if it is only single word. I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to have this kind of thing happening to [...]

Listening to myself—talking with my children about (grand)children or the neighbors about the (neighbor)hood or my friends about (geo)politics or my colleagues about where “descent with modification” (Darwin’s definition of evolution) has brought us—I hear myself opining more and more these days:
We need to break the cycle. Or,
We need to break the spell.
I usually use [...]

For me, one of the things that makes the estimable “times in which we live” so doggone mesmerizing is the shear scope of the questions being asked. Add to that new technologies for pursuing answers. This equates to some remarkable successes, coming one after the other, in understanding ourselves and the world around us.
Such a [...]

The future of the human species, and the future of the many other species whose fate is tied to ours, however directly or indirectly, hinges on what the human brain can be taught to do with this question: Is there another way to explain or do this?
This has always been the question. Every advance in [...]

In a used bookstore earlier this week, I discovered this note, written on the inside cover of a copy of Karen Armstrong’s work, A History of God, in the still-childish hand of a young woman wise beyond her years:
“Dad, which is it? is man one of God’s blunders, or is God one of man’s blunders? [...]

Leo Bakx from Denmark, WA, Australia writes:
Your blog post on the Denmark Cartoon Incident piqued my interest as I live in Denmark (the place in Western Australia, LOL!). Well, the whole thing with the religious aspects of the matter and the controversy between Islam and Christianity/Judaism is intriguing. And I’m very interested in [...]

I am accustomed to being questioned by prospective business clients on all kinds of issues. What I’m not accustomed to is having them ask me, unexpectedly and point-blank, as happened over dinner not long ago, “Do you believe in God?”
But it happened, and I replied immediately, “I don’t believe in your God.”
I think that’s [...]

A few days ago—in mid-November—the Society for Neuroscience met in Washington, DC, in an event that, if it had any message at all (and it had many), it was this: in terms of exploring and understanding how the brain works, times are a’changing. This was indicated from the opening moments because guess who was invited [...]

As hard as I try, I can’t keep Mark Twain’s posthumously published story, The Mysterious Stranger, off my mind for very long these days. That’s because I keep reading the daily newspaper.
Twain’s story was published posthumously because he thought it might get him hung from the nearest tree if he were alive when it appeared. [...]

What follows is a very long quote by the standards of length I intend for quotes in this space. My rules are violated in this instance because of my intense interest in the troubling issues produced by the increased commingling of church and state in America today.
The speaker is the philosopher George Santayana. The passage [...]