The ability to sympathize with those around us seems crucial to our survival, and it's connected to the mirroring functions of the brain.
From Jay Parini
Sarah Palin is a figure of fun on the American left, easily lampooned as a know-nothing, gun-toting ex-beauty queen who loves God and the red, white and blue above pretty much anything else except for Todd, her macho husband, who races snowmobiles across the Alaskan tundra.
To bolster his right flank and attract women voters, John McCain had cynically opted for a running mate who was, by any stretch of the imagination, unqualified for a position a heartbeat away from the presidency.
'Bag of Bones' was a big, distorted yet wonderfully entertaining novel that rode high on the bestseller lists in 1998.
History is, of course, a made thing. It does not exist by itself in anything like a recognizable form.
Indeed, we might all forget where we have been if we didn't have somebody to assemble and arrange the little blocks called facts from which history is constructed, artfully or less so.
Language kills, and inflamed rhetoric of the kind that spews almost daily from the lips of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and others running for public office in this country should be condemned.
It's time that Americans dealt seriously with guns, getting in place strong and appropriate measures - there is no excuse for anything but the strictest controls.
A long-running argument exists over whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. In my view, they certainly do.
The ancient Greeks and Romans were comfortable with any number of deities and were quite open to allowing conquered nations to continue to worship in whatever ways they saw fit, as long as they didn't mind having an emperor who required taxes and tributes.
8 perspectives
7 perspectives
6 perspectives
5 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives