THE LIFESAVER RELAY

On a Saturday night in the fall of my freshman year my parents dropped me off at a party in the gymnasium of the small parochial high school that I attended.  All the students had been invited to the party, but most of the upperclassmen either had gone to these events before and knew to avoid it or had taken off in the cars that they now had licenses to drive.  As a result, nearly all of the kids remaining were freshmen or sophomores.  A few of the teachers had come to chaperone, but most of the party’s organizers were parents.

REFLECTIONS ON THE VARIETIES OF ATHEIST EXPERIENCE

I have the sense that persons of faith commonly lump atheists into a single class of nonbelievers, as if all of them have a similar attitude toward religion and the existence of God.  That is not the case.  To borrow a phrase from the philosopher William James, just as there are varieties of religious experience, so there are varieties of atheist experience.  And I thought it might be helpful to describe some of the differences among those varieties of nonbelief.

CHOOSING TO FORGIVE

Years ago, I participated in a book club discussion regarding The Sunflower, a slim volume of essays that addressed the question of whether it would have been appropriate for a Jewish prisoner in the Holocaust to forgive a dying Nazi guard who was seeking forgiveness for his role in the Nazi atrocities. I was new to the book club and didn’t say much during the discussion, but now I wish I had, because the question addressed by the book struck me as a very odd one.

A CASE STUDY IN FAKE NEWS

A friend forwarded to me without comment a 2017 YouTube video concerning the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster that resulted from a tsunami that hit the Japanese coast in March of 2011.  Here is a cite to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1ECWtWk85k.  I would invite you to watch it.  It’s about five minutes long.