Category Politics/Culture

History just keeps confounding us—both as we look back upon it with modern sensibilities (“How could they have???”) and how it unfolds in front of us in real time. (“Could this really be happening?”)

But there’s also an in-between take on history that is the recent past. Viewed more from the vantage point of years rather than decades or centuries, it follows upon daily journalism’s “first draft of history” with enough data and perspective to weave together a more complete picture of issues that have vexed or misled us in the whirlwind of everyday life.

Early this past week, “New York Times” columnist David French, a conservative  evangelical Christian, anti-abortion advocate and former attorney who specialized in cases defending religious liberty, did something unusual in the largely partisan world of opinion-mongering. He examined actual data about abortion trends since Roe v...

Sixth century B.C. Greek philosopher Heraclitus, like many who came before and after him, noted the endless flux of existence, he with a particularly rich metaphor that ensured his name would be etched forevermore into the canon of universal wisdom: “You can’t step into the same river twice.”

True enough. The sun rises, the sun sets, and before it rises again, however placid the intervening hours may have seemed, nothing and nobody is exactly as it was the day before.

We’re a day older, a dollar richer or poorer, and, inconveniently enough, our planet a day closer to the exploding fireball it will inevitably become in the course of geologic time. (Whereupon all its parts will change into something else.)

Out of all this comes a synthesis: new knowledge, insights, accommodations and compromises that come together in a fresh and life-giving new reality that honors humans’ dual needs for both tradition/securi...

In case you didn’t recognize it, that’s a picture of an aardvark off to the left. Can’t say that I know or have ever thought much about aardvarks in my life, though the oddity of their physical appearance—halfway between a pig and an anteater, it seems to me—makes them worthy of at least some note.

But “aardvark” is important here for an entirely different reason: As the first actual word in the English dictionary, it stood as a kind of gateway drug from which civil rights icon Malcolm X commenced, with an insatiable, addictive lust, one feverishly ingested word at a time, to devour the majesty of language and the reading, writing, thinking and speaking that are its constituent parts.

A  slave boy laden with bread, which he uses as currency to purchase literacy lessons from poor, under-nourished, ‘free’ white boys? We see Douglass here again soaring to visionary heights of perspective, while also swi...

The perpetrators at least have something resembling an excuse. Although specific medical diagnoses of any given mass shooter fall along a spectrum that may or may not include the frequent, often wrongly used catch-all term, “psychopath,” I strongly doubt that any mental health professional would disagree that all such perpetrators are, by both common and professional understanding, “disordered.”

Whatever compulsions inspire them to commit such heinous acts, it sets them at odds, in a profoundly anti-social way, from most all the rest of their societal peers who reflexively recoil from what they have beheld.

I don’t pretend to understand the precise disorders that drive such behavior (assuming any such understanding is even possible)...

I suspect all artists are as bedeviled by what to leave out of a work as by what to include. The canvas, score or page is only so large, and though one could theoretically keep writing a piece of music or prose without end (until death parts you from it), no sane person would try to keep listening or reading.

But truly, to begin a creative work is often to be overflowing with potential material and overwhelmed by how to shape and contain it.

You have to be careful it doesn’t sprawl all over whatever medium you’re using with either too much material or, in a slight twist on that theme, too much material of one kind at the expense of perhaps more relevant or interesting or even essential material of another kind.

It is the latter occurrence that can leave audience members with more questions at the end of a creative work than they had at the beginning...