Monday morning–early. The 30th Street Amtrak station in Philadelphia is not the sort of place I normally find myself at 5:00 AM on a Monday morning. I have not done a lot of train travelling and have never done so overnight, but today is different than any other day. The only way to make it on time to my friend Ivan Kauffman’s funeral this morning was to take the red-eye from Providence. And there’s no way I’m missing Ivan’s funeral—he... Read more
I briefly and inadvertently got involved with a troll on Facebook the other day. Well, not really inadvertently—I did it on purpose because he pissed me off. My largest collection of Facebook acquaintances is comprised of alums–“Johnnies,” as we lovingly call ourselves–from my alma mater St. John’s College, with matriculation dates ranging from the 1970s (I’m 1978) to last May. They are as eclectic, insightful, brilliant, and annoying as we all thought we were in the 70s, with opinions and interests... Read more
Man is in his actions and practices, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue I suspect that all academics who can still remember their graduate school days will recall books in their disciplines that were all the rage, books that all of the graduate students talked about but that no one had read. During my graduate years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, two of these books were Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and... Read more
The story is told of a little girl who was afraid of the dark. After trying any number of strategies to allay her fears, one night the girl’s frustrated mother said “there really isn’t anything to worry about—Jesus is always with you.” “But I can’t see him!” the little girl wailed. “I know you can’t,” the mother replied, “but he’s there all the same.” This did not help the little girl, who said “sometimes I just need someone with skin... Read more
God is in favor of same sex marriage because God placed a rainbow in the sky when the Genesis flood was over. QED. Me on Facebook On the day before Independence Day I posted an appeal for a patriotic commitment to learning how to achieve disagreement on controversial issues. Patriotism and Achieving Disagreement I wrote that post a week earlier; little did I know that the very next day I would have the opportunity to work on this myself! I... Read more
A recent edition of Harper’s Magazine includes a fascinating essay by physicist and novelist Alan Lightman entitled “Our Place in the Universe.” The point of the essay is to put us in our place, so to speak. Lightman tells us, for instance, of an astronomer whose specialty is exploring the greatest distances in space. The most distant galaxy this scientist has yet seen is about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away from earth—“give or take. Contemporary scientists, Lightman writes, “have revealed a world as far removed... Read more
A beautiful day in Toronto in front of me—what to do? Jeanne was tied up last Saturday from 8-5 with work, the reason we were in Toronto in the first place, so the day was mine to kill. Several items of interest were within a five-minute walk of our hotel. The CN Tower? Maybe. The aquarium? We decided we would do that together on Sunday morning, so not a Saturday option. My choices boiled down to two possibilities—walk the beautiful... Read more
Not long ago I received the following email out of the blue: “My name is ___ and I am a Christian from Pennsylvania. I am getting ready to pursue a career in the study of philosophy of religion at ____ after I graduate high school. I don’t know if you are a believer but if you are I want to ask to you about a few objections that I heard against Christianity that I can’t seem to find an answer for. But... Read more
My novel of the week is Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem. I first encountered Goldstein over the past few weeks when I plowed through her most recent work, Plato at the Googleplex, a creative and insightful insertion of Plato into various twenty-first century venues in an attempt—successful—to establish that the timeless questions of philosophy remain as relevant today as they were in the days of Socrates. The book came highly recommended from the President of my college who also is... Read more
As a youth growing up in northeastern Vermont, a trip to Canada was pretty much the same as a trip to Hartford or Boston—except it took less time. We lived about forty miles south of the border, and most of my family’s favorite hangout spots were north of the border. Montreal, about three hours away, was our big city; Quebec City, about four hours away, was our destination when we wanted to pretend we were in Europe (where none of... Read more
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