Normally, I avoid movie nights. I hate nothing more than the feeling that death might catch me while on hour number three of some Marvel movie. The other night, however, a friend suggested Sophia Coppola’s 2000 film The Virgin Suicides. The plot revolves around a group of young boys observing…

Douglas MacArthur once gushed about his G.I. cadets, “They’re the best damn kids in the world.” Not thirty years before, Cornelia Comer, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, accused the youth of having “mental rickets and curvature of the soul”. Both spoke for their peers when they delivered these assessments. The…

It is on the question of God’s relation to the world that east and west diverge. In the west, our world stands apart from God. It is His creation and it exists insofar as it participates in his essence, which is existence. The universe, and therefore we, are made in…

When the days get long and the weather balmy, I like to have the baseball game playing in the background while I make dinner. …

In his work The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt observes that our moral beliefs are not products of logic, but stem from gut-level emotions which we justify with our rational mind. He concludes that “Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.” These intuitions are grounded in one’s temperament more than anything. This…

Einstein famously quipped: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead — his…

During high school, I worked as a busboy at a fairly posh restaurant. Our manager was an effective but uptight fellow who had little appreciation for jokes. One day, bored during setup, a friend and I decided to get under the manager’s skin a bit. We took the tray of…

Perhaps nothing defines the modern era more than the quest to eliminate essential opposites. This began with the successful search for the laws of nature. As it became more and more apparent that physical phenomena were governed, not by divine fiat, but by quantifiable limitations, it occurred to us that…

If you want to silence a crowd, you should ask them earnestly for what cause they would sacrifice their lives — and not just in the abstract, but today if necessary. Faces will darken, a bit of nervous laughter will break out, but you will receive few ready answers. Some…