Here’s the thing about big words such as community, peace, liberty, and justice: they mean different things to different people. And I don’t mean to be flippant or insensitive when I say that there’s a lot of truth in the saying that, “One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.” So much depends on one’s point of view. When speaking of justice, philosophers have classically made a distinction between distributive justice (which tends to be concerned about distributing justice, or... Read more

We are in the middle of the Jewish High Holy Days, which stretch from Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) on September to Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) on October 9. The ten days in total are also known collectively as the Days of Repentance or the Days of Awe. And the High Holy Days is an auspicious time to reflect on the life and teachings of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber for how they may be able to... Read more

Martin Hägglund (1976 – ), originally from Sweden, is a professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. He opens his book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom with a poignant epigram from Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily Brontë’s only novel: If I were in heaven…I should be extremely miserable…. I dreamt, once, that I was there…. Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were... Read more

At the end of many classes and events, there is an opportunity to complete an evaluation. The questions are usually standard and unremarkable: what you liked, what might’ve been better, etc. One exception to standard evaluation fare has stuck with me more than two decades later. My favorite undergraduate philosophy professor always included an unusual question on his course evaluations: “How might this course be improved in the future other than making the professor 20% smarter?” When we asked him... Read more

Among anthropologists, there’s a classic story about a western missionary meeting an indigenous inhabitant of an island off the East coast of Australia. It was a bright, sunny day, and the missionary happened upon a man relaxing on the beach: MISSIONARY: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life way, lying around like that. MAN: Why? What do you think I should be doing? MISSIONARY: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some of the... Read more

On the occasion of ordaining a new minister in the Unitarian Universalist Living Tradition. One of my favorite podcasts is Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. It features two graduates of Harvard Divinity School reading the Harry Potter series with they same attention, care, and interpretive practices often reserved only for traditional sacred texts.  The podcast started a little more than three years ago. And at the pace of a chapter per episode, they recently completed book five, The Order of the Phoenix.... Read more

There is a fascinating passage from President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address that has stuck with me since I first heard him deliver it. On that cold January day in 2013 (which in a beautiful synchronicity also happened to be Martin Luther King Jr. Day), President Obama said: “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and... Read more

In the seventeenth century, the English politician Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) wrote of all we might accomplish if not for our human limitations: “Had we but world enough and time.” Or as Chaucer penned three centuries earlier: “Time flies, and for no man will it abide.” Turning the clock back even further to the first century BCE, the Roman poet Virgil (70 BCE – 19 BCE) said, “Fugit irreparable tempus” (“Time flies irretrievably”) (Burdick 189). Despite the cautions of these and... Read more

Ginger Lerner-Wren thought she knew what she was getting into. In 1996, she ran as a candidate for a judgeship in Broward County, Florida. After being elected, she was on her way to serving as a judge in the Criminal Division. What she didn’t know is that six months into her tenure she would be asked to take on an additional part-time role presiding over the first mental health court in the United States. One of the reasons this court... Read more

Charles Darwin was born two hundred and ten years ago today on February 12, 1809. And in recent years his birthday has been celebrated as International Darwin Day, an annual opportunity to celebrate the principles that guided his life: “perpetual curiosity, scientific thinking, and hunger for truth.”   One tragedy of the ongoing “Creation vs. Evolution” debate is that coming to terms with Darwin’s theories of natural selection and common descent were among the greatest intellectual challenges of the late nineteenth... Read more