JUSTICE IS A SNACK AWAY Justice. It may be a meal best served cold, but not on an empty stomach. Israeli Neuroscientist and business professor Shai Danziger studied the correlation between food and the likelihood that a judge will grant prisoners parole. In the morning, just after breakfast, the chances of parole are high—around sixty-five percent. But this number quickly plummets until . . . the judge takes a snack break. After the snack, there’s a spike of leniency, then... Read more
(Or: A Little Demonstration of What Religious Freedom Looks Like) POLARIZATION Cilantro. It’s a polarizing vegetable. Many love it. Many hate it. For some, it is just the fresh touch needed to make Mexican and Thai cuisine perfect. For others, cilantro tastes like Ivory Soap. An unbridgeable chasm, it would appear. Three genes have been identified as having to do with cilantro perception. It’s nature—three whole genes. A little investigation, however, offers hope. Though the hatred of cilantro is due... Read more
Happiness is this moment alive in the sunshine knowing I am Loved. Read more
RABBITS In November of 1726 news reached London that a physician had assisted a woman named Mary Tofts as she gave birth to . . . a rabbit. The rabbit, unfortunately, died. Mary Tofts got quite a lot of attention. And even more attention when she gave birth to yet another rabbit—or, well, at least rabbit parts. And another. With various physicians in attendance. All the rabbits died, but all the physicians called in to assist the births swore that... Read more
When I was a kid, I loved wandering in the barn on my grandfather’s farm. The barn had been built around a two-story log house. In the loft of the barn was a jumble of old farming equipment. My favorite piece of equipment there was what was known as a stitching horse. This was a bench used for harness repair. A stitching horse consisted of a wooden bench with a pair of wooden arms about two feet long. By stepping... Read more
Humanism does not require the death of God. All it requires is the affirmation of human freedom. William R. Jones ONE OF THOSE VICIOUS CIRCLES The French philosopher Denis Diderot, an Enlightenment era humanist, gets my vote for the most succinct summary of the connection between government, religion, and oppression: “People will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” Thomas Jefferson, another who spoke of violent revolution, called Diderot “among the... Read more
“We all have two religions: the religion we talk about and the religion we live. It is our task to make the difference between the two as small as possible.” ~Elaine Gallagher Gehrmann Unitarian Universalism is a living faith tradition which does not insist upon exactly what you believe, but which demands that the life you live reflect your faith beliefs. In this way, UUs are not, as it is sometimes casually said, free to believe anything we want. There... Read more
WHERE ONLY BLACK MEN JAYWALK We are rightly celebrating the bravery of people—both the famous and the forgotten—who contributed to the events at Selma, Alabama fifty years ago, events that led to a sea change in the civil rights of many US citizens. The anniversary has led inevitably to a question: Are things better now? In one way, yes. Yet, getting rid of overt, state-sanctioned oppression is somewhat like shooting fish in a barrel. The target is not hard to... Read more
Church Attendance Free Fall The Barna Group, a research group that keeps up with trends in religion, estimates that 48% of Millennials (born 1984-2002) are “post-Christian.” Forty-eight percent. “Post-Christian” means that they have heard of Christianity; know its claims; swim in its assumptions; and have little to no interest in it as a method for providing meaning and purpose in their lives. The study point out, “if unchurched Americans were a nation, they would be the eighth largest nation on... Read more
The recent Atlantic article by Graeme Wood, “What Isis Really Wants,” examines the Isis phenomenon from the vantage point of apocalyptic movements. It’s an insightful article. I’m just a bit confused at the reaction. We’ve had apocalyptic thinking living in our midst here in the US for some time. I grew up Pentecostal. Now that’s a death cult for you. I grew up among people obsessed by “The End Times” and obsessed with the thought that we were living in... Read more
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