Religion, Part II. I should say more should I not? There’s always evidence around of our sense of a “greater” reality. Walking through a graveyard is the easiest way to get an idea of what is thought, or better, the nature of what some of us believe about the greater or deeper or hidden…
I suppose this is a good place to start. The Latin word means “to tie, to bind” and is related to the word religio which means “respect,” “awe,” or “sanctity” suggesting that the soul is bound to god. Well – ok. The notion that one is inherently, inevitably, innately “religious” works as long as…
I walked north along the Fox River trail from Batavia to Geneva yesterday. In my estimation this is not a long walk, about two miles round trip. I could not fail to notice how low the river is presently. Due to a lack of rain you could walk across the shallows bank to bank,…
I wonder if life would be better as a “lower” mammal, rather than as a human being? A non human mammal, without the facility of language would be equipped with efficient senses, better sight, hearing, smell along with instinct honed as a serrated blade. The mammal would not be burdened with the paradoxes of…
Could the second law of thermodynamics be the least abstract of all scientific principles? I am thinking of entropy, the arrow of time. Left to itself, a system, or a human being, or a city, a whole society, a solar system will reach a state of equilibrium. The principle was first formulated in 1824. Heat…
Many months ago it felt right to use “Plague Journal” in the title line for these posts. I assumed that fighting the virus would be a process, that the work of research with the public’s self-interested cooperation would reduce the corona virus to a minor inconvenience. A two year anniversary is approaching since our…
How to begin. Yesterday was the 20th anniversary, of the September 11th, 2001 suicide attack on the twin towers in Manhattan, on the Pentagon, and the fourth passenger jet plowing into the earth at Shanksville Pennsylvania. Four occasions of mass death were memorialized yesterday by ceremonies at the sites where they occurred. I paid…
How many years since the War of Southern Rebellion ended? For many of those years a statue of Robert E. Lee mounted on his horse Traveler has occupied a prominent place on Monument Avenue in Richmond Virginia. Lee was commander in chief of the pro-slavery forces (human trafficking) that fought for four long years…
If I could — I would. The discussion was intense for an hour and a half. If I could re-invent higher education, where would I start, what would I change? The question is more than an idle thought experiment, a mind game. Human beings without the benefit of instincts, rely upon the internal map…
Today is the day after Labor Day. We visited the town of Ottawa yesterday. The town is about an hour drive south, near the terminus of the Fox River. Ottawa is the seat of Lasalle County and was the site of the first debate between Stephen A. Douglass and Abraham Lincoln in 1858. The…
