As a college student and professor, I am familiar with the unfortunate pattern of the Greek system on American campuses. Something awful will happen involving a fraternity or sorority, such as sexual assault, racist stuff, or a hazing death. Then there will be a backlash and calls for banning fraternities (and sometimes sororities). Administrative action…
The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and loss inseparable from being a creature with hopes and longings constantly colliding with reality, with the indifference of time and chance,…
“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her exquisite insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” The price we pay for the risk is the great equalizer of humanity. In heartbreak, everyone is shorn of dignity, everyone follows the same pattern of self-prostration: the willful blindness to the first signs of being…
Stepping up to the subtle gestures that can redeem a day, or a life. We live between the scale of gluons and the scale of galaxies, incapable of touching either, irrelevant to the fate of both. Forged of the dust of dying stars, we move through a universe of impartial laws with our dreams and…
How, knowing that even the universe is dying, do we bear our lives? Most readily, through friendship, through connection, through co-creating the world we want to live in for the brief time we have together on this lonely, perfect planet. The seventh annual Universe in Verse — a many-hearted labor of love, celebrating the wonder…
Mindfulness and compassion can help a family during the process of gender transition.
Food should nourish us, not consume us. This post explores how the pursuit of perfect nutrition can quietly undermine health.
Why do we tend to assume that UFOs are crafts carrying alien beings rather than alien beings themselves? How the UFO phenomena continue to reveal unfounded human assumptions.
In a culture saturated with scientific, psychological, and sophistic approaches to the other, openness is in short supply.
