If you know anything about Anna Karenina, you know that it is the story of a woman who abandons her husband for another man, and comes to a bad end. What you might not know is that the novel is about two marriages: Anna’s, which ends sadly, and Levin’s, which, though not without the usual stresses, goes well. The often-quoted first sentence of the book sets up the dichotomy: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
I write and speak on a wide range of topics. In recent years I’ve concentrated on ancient Christian spirituality and the Eastern Orthodox faith, but the hundreds of Essays on this site include movie reviews, humor, marriage and family, cultural issues, and more. Essays can be browsed by date or…
[Christianity Today Movies; August 24, 2010] Stars: 2 Rated: PG Cast: Madeline Carroll (Juli Baker), Callan McAuliffe (Bryce Loski), Rebecca De Mornay (Patsy Loski), Anthony Edwards (Steven Loski), John Mahoney (Chet Duncan) Can it be love at first sight if you’re seven years old? “Flipped” proposes that, yes, it can,…
[Frederica Here and Now; April 22, 2009] When my daughter-in-law brought in the harvest from her very diligent vegetable gardening, she sent me a photo of the bounty. I felt immediate wonder and gratitude—that with the sweat of her brow (and the much smaller brows of her 6 little ones)…
What is life like “In the Womb”? Thanks to National Geographic, we can refresh our memories with a beautiful book by that title, as well as a TV miniseries that makes use of the most advanced video technology. A new book and series now examines the prenatal life of our fellow mammals—and it’s weirder than you’d think.
[Ancient Faith Radio; September 13, 2007]
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In early June I went to Los Angeles to speak at a conference
at Pepperdine University that was on a fascinating topic; it was about a
capella church music. I didn’t know
this, but Pepperdine was established as a Church of Christ school—Church of
Christ being a flavor of Christianity that is extremely Bible-based, very
conservative in many senses, and in fact, they say the three things that make
them different from most protestant churches is that they have weekly communion,
they baptize by full immersion, and that everything in their worship is sung
without instruments, it’s all a capella.
They say they do these three things because that’s the way the early
church did it, and of course as an Orthodox visitor to the campus, I was
delighted to say, ‘Yeah, that’s the reason we do it too.’ We certainly agree that that’s what the early
church did.
[Beliefnet, February 14, 2001] It took me about 200 miles to admit that I was wrong. A few hours back up the road I had been slamming around the house, irritated that I was late leaving on a solo car trip, disorganized, frustrated, and my complaints were gradually enlarging to…
[Religion News Service, December 9, 1996]
The story has become familiar: Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson were high school sweethearts in a New York City suburb usually described as “affluent.” They went off to separate colleges as freshmen this fall, but met in mid‑November at a motel outside Newark, Del. There she delivered their firstborn son, and Peterson swaddled him in bloody motel linens and laid him in a gray garbage bag. The corpse was later recovered from the motel trash bin.
[Religion News Service, November 12, 1996]
Well, here we are. Or are we?
It's an open question among some academic sophisticates. Does anything exist? If it did, how would you know? Is there any feasible way to prove it? Or is everything we perceive (if indeed there's anything there at all) so colored by preconceptions that nothing can be definitively stated?
Is what we call “reality” merely constructed of our prejudices and whims ‑‑ or worse, constructed of our desire to gather power and subjugate others? Can one really state that “physical reality ... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct”?
That's what Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, asserted not long ago in the pages of the journal, Social Text. Unfortunately for the editors of Social Text, Sokal was only kidding.
