Month: June 2004

Perhaps because of its unreformed origins in an archaic era — archaic in the chronological sense — Islam has historically had little place for hermi...

In her book Goddesses in Older Women: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty, Jean Shinoda Bolen uses the image of the Greek goddess Hestia as the archetype of women wh...

Reading Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: the Emotional World of Farm Animals. Masson’s books have always been pleasant romp...

Atheism has always been a skepticism born of politics, a point of view arising from the realization that power and authority define what society respects and, u...

Wendell Berry, the political/environmental/agrarian writer, cites a 1907 traveler to China who noted that the average agrarian household of twelve was self-suff...

1. I saw the bears the other day, but, alas, only two of the original four (mother and three cubs), about which I had written more than a year ago. These were p...

Jean Giono’s “The Man Who Planted Trees” is a wonderful tale of a hermit in Provence who takes upon himself the planting of oak trees in a bar...

That religions, especially Western theisms, are rooted in specific historical and cultural circumstances does not of itself impinge upon their “validity.&...

Atheism is not the skepticism of antiquity with reference to the gods nor that of the Age of Enlightenment with its nascent individualism. Modern atheism is bas...

Atheism creates of theism — its antagonist — a system and logic that is a counterpart to be refuted point by point. This assumes that theism is a lo...