Every once in a while, when my life is going completely haywire, I do something I call “taking the week-end.”   What “taking the week-end” means is this:  from the time the mail arrives on Friday afternoon, until I wake up Monday morning, I just stop thinking about all the things I have to think about. …

So, I’m  not so much writing a blog post today as I’m waiting out a period of time while I see if students will come in and save their asses.  Probably not, but where there’s life, there’ s hope.  And  this is my last day with these students, so I’m feeling generous. I’m also feeling…

So, you know, every once in a while comments actually do what I want them to do, and that makes everything easier. Robert complains–if I’m reading him right–that obviously there is no such thing as the summum bonum, because obviously different people are made happy by different things.  Sadists and masochists are made happy by…

It’s been an odd few days.  For one thing,  the weather has been awful, and beyond awful.   First there was snow, then there was more snow, then there was ice, now there’s more snow coming.   Doctor appointments have gone down the tubes.  The schools are all closed.  The temperatures resemble nursery school counting games. This…

So, here’s the thing. Today, I ran across two articles, on subjects at least theoretically completely different, that in fact claimed things I think are pretty much alike.  The first of them is this one, posted in the comments by Mike Fisher: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-religiosity-gene-dominate-society.html This is about religion, and the sentence that struck me the hardest…

One of the problems I have discussing religion on the Net is that I seem to be out of place and out of time for the present discussion.  When I think of  “Christianity,” I think not just of the high intellectual end of Roman Catholicism, but of the high intellectual end of Roman Catholicism in…

So.  I’m having one of those weird mornings here.  The final draft of the Georgia Xenakis book is sort of finally getting there.  In a lot of ways, I really hate working on a new book, but especially on a new book that isn’t part of an existing series.  Introducing characters is actually a lot…

My apologies–or maybe not–to Terry Pratchett. There was a minor deity (small god?) in classical Rome called Vaticanus, who was the god of crying infants. I came across this information while sort of winding my way through City of God.  It’s one of those books that isn’t really a book in the way we define…

Well, what can I say?  Things are calmer here today, if only because there’s not much I can do in the weather we’re having.  I’d intended to make some comment about Mike Fisher’s comment about the epistemology of evangelical Christians, and I want to do that–for the reason, really, that declaring everything an “opinion” is…

So, today I got a number of e-mails noting that I haven’t posted anything for four days–which I’m sorry for, if only because I want to answer Mike Fisher’s comment about epistemology. And, on the subject of “it’s all just opinion,” I’ve got a lot to say. But I’m not totally crashing and burning, and…