It was on this day in 1838 that Ralph Waldo Emerson, who six years before had resigned as minister of the Second Church (Unitarian), was invited to speak to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School. The now famous or infamous, your choice, Divinity School Address, as Coleen Walsh writing in the Harvard Gazette notes, “represented a turning point for Unitarianism, beginning its transformation from a liberal form of Christianity to a type of religious liberalism independent of specific historic... Read more

After a decade hurtling through space at seven forty-nine in the morning, Eastern time, space probe New Horizons should have passed less than eight thousand miles from Pluto. Assuming nothing horrible happened we will receive pictures, lots and lots of pictures around midnight on Wednesday. For more on this amazing feat go here. Read more

Forbes Magazine ranked Joaquin Guzman Loera, Mexican crime king pin, and now twice escaped prisoner, on its list of self made billionaires for four years running. On the one hand it was simply meant as a list of rich people without regard to how they made their fortunes. And when people objected they discovered reasons to not include him on the list. However, I have an abiding feeling the initial impulse of the good folk at Forbes was that in... Read more

Sir Patrick Stewart was born on this day in 1940, in Yorkshire, England. Read more

(Some of what follows has appeared in somewhat different form elsewhere before, including in my most recent book If You’re Lucky, Your Heart Will Break. But, it felt appropriate, considering the day….) Henry David Thoreau was born on this day in 1817. I was maybe fifteen, possibly sixteen when I first read Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. I thrilled at the opening paragraph with its pure disdain for external authorities of any sort. In retrospect I realize this is the... Read more

An interesting clip from Business Insider, produced by Alex Kuzoian. The price of viewing is an advertisement. They seem to like to do things like this. Of course it is only the big five. I personally would enjoy a somewhat more nuanced picture, ideally, including the rise and spread of secularism. Still, as I said, interesting… Read more

just ’cause… Read more

I am sufficiently out of it that I was unaware there are contending Beatle’s Days out there. One is today, the 10th of July, marking their return to Liverpool following their wildly successful first tour of the United States. It is observed in, of course, Liverpool, but also in Hamburg, their other “home” city. However for reasons I don’t quite follow, the Wikipedia article on this important holiday say mostly Americans prefer to observe the 27th of February as Beatles... Read more

WHO IS THAT OTHER? A Zen Reflection That Starts With a Christian Text James Ishmael Ford The Case Wuzu said, “Shakyamuni and Maitreya are servants of another. So, tell me, who is that other?” Wumenguan, Case 45 The good old King James Version of the Bible has Paul’s first letter to Timothy assert, “For the love of money is the root of all evil…” I recall it being thundered from the pulpits of my childhood. Ours was a poor people’s... Read more

Peter Anton Orlovsky was born on this day in 1933. In 1954 he was working as an artist’s model when he met Allen Ginsberg. They began a life long relationship, which only ended with Ginsberg’s death in 1997. While they were living in Paris Ginsberg encourage Orlovsky to begin to work seriously on his poetry, which until then he simply dabbled with. As the New York Times obit says, his work was “emotionally naked, loopy and occasionally luminescent.” Overshadowed during... Read more