Columns

Philosophy and the philosophy of science supply us, as residents of a climate changed and climate changing world, with four key ideas to help us make the most of an increasingly terrible situation and to help us try to avoid contributing to an even more dreadful one in the future. The four ideas are “Pascal’s […]

I’ve had a number of students and young friends over the years tell me that voting didn’t matter to them, that it seems a futile exercise and an inconsequential bother they just couldn’t buy into. Their remarks have always flummoxed me, and my response has never seemed adequate. And, indeed, when one sees politics through […]

Sometimes current history requires that we reexamine our fundamental beliefs and understand in new ways why we feel the way we do. For me, in these hate-filled times, it seems clearer than ever that any kind of prejudice — from racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, to ageism, religious prejudice, and all cultural and tribal hatreds […]

A poem by V.B. Price   I. RESTRAINT Are we all prophets without honor in the homeland of our inner lives, weeping Jeremiahs haranguing our resentments, pathetic outbursts, sly lusts, our sweet teeth chattering? What a joy it would be to have no need of self-restraint. To be so true to life that we are, […]

Most of us in America — rich or poor, female or male, religious or not, from the right or left, in all ethnic or racial communities — have it somewhere in our political DNA the ethical imperatives to be helpful and to be good. That is the foundation for all realistic hopefulness in this time […]

With the retirement of senior Associate Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, the chance of the United States finding itself at the mercy of the dark side of its collective psyche is terrifyingly real. With a second Trump appointee on the bench, a Tea Party-Moral Majority-Sagebrush Rebellion Supreme Court could pile up xenophobic, misogynistic and homophobic […]

Does America look like a proto-neo-Nazi state? Does it seem like some foreign power is yanking our chain and messing with the honest dialogue and exchange of views, not to mention our inviolable voting rights, that still makes our Democracy work in the sense of a peaceful transfer of power at the appropriate times? Are […]