Art Blakey uttered this wonderful line in the superb documentary on Jazz by Ken Burns. I am presently watching the 10th and final episode of a film that taught me a new understanding of American history.
For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn
Ernest Hemingway proved that it is possible to write an entire novel in one line.
Where is Paradise?
The Economist reviews two books on the idea of paradise throughout human history. By historical standards, people in the industrialized countries are close to paradise in a material sense. The trick is to feel spiritually this way. The Germans have proven in the past few weeks that possessing a good national soccer team helps a 
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[Read More] How Christian Dominations Reacted to Modern Science
The followers of Jesus have been fighting about the proper way to interpret his teaching from the very beginning. Since Jesus did not write down his philosophy the writers of the ghospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) that made it into New Testament had signficant interpretative flexibility to write up his message, making it all 
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[Read More] The Dalai Lama and Science
Last July, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the archbishop of Vienna, wanted to turn back the clock in the catholic church. Breaking with two generations of catholic scholars, Schoenborn did his best to portray the teaching of the catholic church as being in opposition to a Darwinian explanation of the development of different life forms (see below 
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[Read More] Is Christianity Compatible with Republican Values?
I always found it curious that fundamental Christians preferred in large numbers Republicans over Democrats. After all, the core values of the democratic party seem to be much more in tune with Christianity. At least one evangelic pastor woke up recently and remembered that Christians are supposed to support peace and not war. Read this [Read More]
Happiness Through the Ages
What makes it so difficult to interpret how people in former times have thought about the human condition is that words change their meanings over time, sometimes morphing into the exact opposite of what they originally meant. As I just learned by reading in ‘The Economist’ a review of “Happiness: A History, ” the word 
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[Read More] William Wordsworth on Good and Evil
Adam Kirsch in his Dec 5, 2005, review in the New Yorker of Juliet Barker’s new biography Wordsworth: A Life writes that Woodsworth believed that the soul, uncontaminated by wealth and unperverted by extreme poverty, is essentially good; more, that it is part of a universal frame of goodndess, which can also also be glimpseed [Read More]
Transfixed in the Cineplex
DANIEL MARK EPSTEIN explains in the WSJ review of “The Power of Movies” what happens when we are at the movies.
Seduced, disturbed, beguiled—something strange and compelling happens when we watch a movie: When my daughter was four years old, we took her to see “The Wizard of Oz.” She emerged from the darkness transformed: [Read More]
