Tell me everything you know, the sapient sage asked the seeker, and, since the former was, in his role, an editor, the latter filled page after page of all that followed and preceded cause and wherefore and why and when. Which he gave to waiting world and bookman with a flourish, so: here’s the . . . . Continue Reading »
Eternity is uncorrupted light; the world proceeds by interrupting sight, exchanging day and night. Half the acts of earth avoid the sun; much that's done may be begun by day but end at night: aborted, buried light is customary here; it shocks no more than does a war such as the one we wage against . . . . Continue Reading »
Prospects for a Common Morality edited by gene outka and john p. reeder, jr. princeton university press, 302 pages, $47.50 cloth, $16.95 paper Eleven distinguished ethicists weigh in on the question of whether there is a universal morality, relevant to all cultures and traditions by virtue of . . . . Continue Reading »
Thinking of my grandparents, I stand for a moment on the curb of a street they often walked, the old walks cracked and chipped, and I want to call out to them, as if they were climbers just ahead moving across rock and fields of ice, rubble in the slip of years past. But if they spoke, would . . . . Continue Reading »
In Washington, where he was to give the eighteenth Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on May 3, 1989, Walker Percy also gave an interview to Scott Walter for Crisis . This is almost exactly a year before his death, and both the interview and his lecture, “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault . . . . Continue Reading »
Ronald L. Numbers, who holds a chair in the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Wisconsin, has performed a desperately needed service in this book, and he has performed it very well. Toward the end of the volume there is trenchant, if succinct, interpretation, but mostly this is a . . . . Continue Reading »
Of late I have been reading John B. Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus . I have enjoyed it, not least because the book is clearly and carefully written, even if the Jesus who emerges from these pages is not exactly the “startling” figure promised by the dust . . . . Continue Reading »
Half a century ago the word “discrimination” had already among its meanings the making of adverse distinctions with respect to persons. Today, following some fifty years of incessant attention to discrimination in that sense, it hardly supports any other. Such things happen to words, of course. . . . . Continue Reading »
When Dr. George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, visited Pope John Paul II in May 1992, the two church leaders discussed the probable future ordination of women priests in the Anglican Church. That, the Pope said, “touched on the very nature of the sacrament of holy orders.” A Vatican . . . . Continue Reading »
During the past two decades, prenatal screening for fetal defects has become a standard part of nearly every pregnant woman’s medical care. Tests conducted during the first half of pregnancy are designed to detect a wide range of genetic and other disorders, and to give women the option of . . . . Continue Reading »
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