6/2/1998 Yad V'Shem (Hand and name) Holocaust Memorial Museum, Jerusalem "Don't fix your large brown eyes upon me.... And don't ask me Why and wherefore we have to leave our homes." --SB Shayewicz, "Lekh Lekha" 1942 Dedalus, Consider how quiet it is here, now. Earlier I was angry. Bless the girl beside me for singing, or for making me believe she was mourning. They have seen it before. They live this truth their whole lives, day to day...

Here's a debate that's going to go on for some time: Creation versus Evolution. People love to choose sides on this one, as the recent JoeUser post, "HERE'S THE PROOF THAT GOD EXISTS" by Marvin Cooley and subsequent postings demonstrate. The author and sympathizers make some effort to debunk evolution. By using creation to polarly oppose evolution, they justify their argument when a logical step in the theory of evolution cannot be proved, or has been proven false. This argument style ...

Why do we believe in innocence? Why do we believe in corruption? We talk about the innocence of childhood. We long for the simplicity of a sand castle, we believe in soap bubbles and fireflies and the purity of our youth. And when we deal with the adult complexities of taking responsibility for our actions and for the hurts and "crimes" of other people, we imagine the old times of our lives when we were removed from the tireless pain of "reality." The biblical account of the Fall from E...

In 1894, a Hungarian "Rabbi", Leopold Cohn, firmly established the roots of Jews for Jesus in an unaffiliated but intimately related movement in America. He founded the American Board of Missions to the Jews, a title later streamlined into the more attractive-sounding "Chosen People's Ministries". Sounds like the "A" League baseball team at a parochial school, does it not? His method was simple: he set up shop in Brooklyn around the turn of the century, and provided "English and citizen cl...

Horrors are easy to come by these days. Horrors arrive in torrential rains or waves, or rise from the earth when subterranean rock plates collide. There is something altogether different--a sense of truth, perhaps--when one human kills another, however; you wonder about reasons and God, morality and faith. Horror derives from a lack of apocalyptic finality after millions die in trench fighting or succumb to rampant disease in World War I; or when neighbors kill neighbors in Civil Wars th...