essay
The history of humanity is characterized by many wars and cultural incursions, religious conversions and cultural transformations. Greek and Roman cultures spread beyond the places of their origin, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam spilled over to regions thousands of miles away from the birthplace of their founders. Hindu art, sculpture, and epics have had significant impacts…
I left a band recently. I had my reasons but wasn’t sure whether to share them on exit. I didn’t want to be dishonest. I can remember times when people gave me vacuous excuses for parting with me. Here I had invested heavily in a relationship and they were too stingy to let me in…
Hey, do I look like I’m kidding? Well, okay, yes, I usually look like I’m kidding. But in more ways than one, I’m serious when I say that Metanexus 2009 promises to be our hottest conference yet. The year 2009 has been named The International Year of Astronomy. According to the official website of the…
Studying politics and history, one character keeps popping up and making trouble. Here are his essential characteristics: 1. He believes he knows what everyone should do.2. He believes it is his mission to get everyone to do it.3. He is 100% confident in this belief and mission.4. He is also 100% confident that he has…
“Mere praxis is not light” (Pope Benedict XVI) A book written by Pope Benedict XVI, before he became Pope, whose title translates from the Italian as Europe: Its Spiritual Foundation of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, ought to be read by every European of whatever faith or no faith to better understand the roots of a…
It is no great secret that all through history, and in practically all cultures, men have been dominating women. In a good many contexts they have also been oppressing women in overt and in subtle ways. As in all contexts where one group oppresses another, for many long centuries it did not even occur to…
Maple leaves, dry and curled,eddy in a ghost dance,speak to her with voices long gone…father’s chant, mother’s croon,lover’s ragged breath, whispera name she once ownedbut has forgotten.Bonfires carry their spirits to the skyleave behind a nutbrown scent she tries to hold. óJeanie Tomanek, Genesee Moons Artist’s Statement Throughout my adult life I have always paintedósometimes…
Sociology was among the many new disciplines initiated by scientific methodology during the nineteenth century. Its goal was to study systematically how societies function, so as to obtain a deeper understanding of human behavior. In the twentieth century it came to be applied to science as a human enterprise. Thus was born a new field:…
The next difficulty is the identification of those secular matters that already exist within religion as such. This is not an easy task, since the time of Marx’s stigmatization of religion as “the opium of the masses,” ushering in secular atheistic humanism. To be sure, an anti-religion stance was already in place within Western civilization…
Yesterday I found myself at a business consultant’s birthday party where I met a warm fellow who was eager to tell me about a book he has just written about caring. Like all consultants, he was able to describe how dysfunctional large organizations can be and quick also to identify the one thing that would…