"Starfleet was founded to seek out new life. Well, there it sits! Waiting.” -- Captain Jean-luc Picard, ‘The Measure of a Man’; Star Trek: The Next Generation Leave it to good old Jean-luc Picard, the impossibly moral captain of the starship USS Enterprise-D to present a philosophical question so eloquently. Those lines, screen written in 1989 by Melinda Snodgrass have become all too prescient in an age when the U.S. is literally betting everything on winning

As many readers of this space are aware, I had my dance with death three years ago -- which is chronicled and referenced in previous posts. It was an experience -- in reality one of many, that I am not in any great hurry to repeat. Ever since then, I have been on a journey to find meaning in that experience, to try and understand why I was spared a one-way ticket to that Great White Light (or whatever other afterlife your religion or culture professes, dear reader). As part o

As artificial intelligence has upended the way in which students read, learn and write, as well as how teachers evaluate and mark, professors and leaders at institutions of higher learning appear to have been largely left to their own devices to figure out how to teach in a profoundly transformed landscape. Many faculty members in the hard sciences and social sciences have pointed to the “productivity boost” AI can offer, and the research potential unlocked by its ability to

When I was hospitalized from a near death experience not so long ago and recovery was frustratingly slow, what time I had (and there was a lot of it) was filled by going through a voluminous tome on the life of St. Padre Pio. From dawn to dusk I would pore through each page driven as much by how compelling his life story was as well as a strange sense of succor, as if the words were taking me out of a calamitous predicament and transporting me to a place which brought peace.

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Today is Christmas. And for the next few days or so, all will seem well. The ugliness of the world will recede. Toil and care will be set...

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there was no God. Or not, at least, the walking, talking God of the Old and New Testament...