Essay

Between the two extremes, there is a third possibility: that all religions are partly true.

The core insight behind science goes something like this: To get what you want, set aside what you want long enough to see what is.

We want to pay attention to what’s relevant and not what’s irrelevant. Irrelevant big-picture factors can distract us from paying attention to crucial details. But lost in the details, we can miss something crucial about the big picture.

Since meaning means a whole lot to us, semiotics should too, and yet most of us have never heard of this academic discipline.

The new cosmos is everyone’s home, its origin story is everyone’s story, and sharing the unique place of intelligent life in this astonishing universe is a bond that unites us all.

The repetition of disasters may numb us and make compassion a sentiment whose evolutionary cost becomes too high. If that happens, we lose not only the climate but our souls.

We see death coming and it doesn’t look good. We cope by committing to culturally defined immortality campaigns, which we hope will make us much larger than our physical lives.

Spirituality is one’s overall strategy for coping with the challenge of investing, knowing that one must eventually divest. Spirituality is a kind of preparation, a pre-grieving. Defined this way, I see three main spiritual paths.