This is that story about the time when I came across a street-fair vendor in Everybody's Home Town who was selling Confederate flag decals and "White Power" T-shirts. So I helped him. I helped him for about 15 minutes before he called the police. Read more

We've got a nuclear deal with Iran and a successful up-close fly-by of Pluto -- not bad for a Tuesday. Plus: Farewell to a freedom fighter; responding to the heroin crisis; sharks in a volcano; and the physics of bubble wrap and D&D. Read more

Since I'm the one who brought up the whole discussion of souls and soul-talk, Helena's question in comments seems fair and excellent and necessary: "Is it too much to ask that Fred whether he thinks the soul survives death, and if so, what happens to it?" Ay, there's the rub. It's a version of a very old question that persists because it remains unanswered for anyone we can hear asking it. It's a question that tends to reduce me to babbling about "Flatland" or to quoting Whitman. Read more

Old newspaper headlines employ the word "souls," and we bring to that word all of our Platonic, dualistic baggage and assumptions about what that word means. But their use of the word suggests something wholly incompatible with those dualistic ideas. Their use of the word -- their appeal to the concept -- is quite the opposite of what we expect when we approach that word with all of the connotations we've absorbed from Plato and Augustine and revivalist altar-call soteriology. Read more