Peter Murmann

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 [Read More]

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]

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 [Read More]

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]

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]

Dad’s Coming 1873.  See the Online Catalog of the Exhibit.

Audio Tour of Right & Left