The Papacy: Authority and Obedience
The recent grand tour of the eastern United States by Pope Benedict XVI was a carefully choreographed propaganda event. Its purpose was, apparently, to rescue America’s Roman Catholic Church and...
View ArticleRetake The Moral High Ground
The United States has been ridding itself of its First World status for as long as it has been privatizing its critical infrastructure (a.k.a. the common good), at the same time despoiling the...
View ArticleEvolutionary Humanism for a New Era
Paul Kurtz once asked, “Can scientific naturalism, insofar as it undermines theism, provide an alternative, dramatic, poetic rendering of the human condition?” Years earlier, Julian Huxley (1887–1975)...
View ArticleThe Lost Rewards of the Spiritual Life
“I don’t believe in God, but I’m a spiritual person.” These are the exact words I recently overheard a young woman say to a man with whom she was flirting on a train. I hear the same or similar words...
View ArticleThe Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life
On the streets of London, the placards scream, “FREE SPEECH, GO TO HELL,” an unintentional masterpiece of British irony. In Beirut, twenty thousand mass at the Danish embassy with signs reading ,...
View ArticleWhy Is There a Universe at All Rather than Just Nothing? Part 1
In his 1697 article “On the Ultimate Origination of Things,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz posed a historic question: he demanded “a full reason why there should be any world rather than none.” In a sequel...
View ArticleThe Ideas of Arthur C. Clarke
Most critical discussions of Arthur C. Clarke’s writings rarely delve beyond his stories and novels; but to understand his fiction, one must examine how Clarke thought about future pos sibilities. His...
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A Star Has Gone Out
A bone was hurled high into the air by a prehistoric hand. When it came down, it was a spaceship. All of human history was encapsulated between these two shots of that now-famous montage in the 1968...
View ArticleNinetieth-Birthday Reflections
This is the text of a video address recorded by Sir Arthur C. Clarke on December 5, 2007, and posted online on the occasion of his ninietieth birthday. It was one of his last public statements prior...
View ArticleIntroduction
Sir Arthur C. Clarke was one of the greatest futurists and science-fiction writers of the twentieth century. He authored some one hundred books, including 2001: A Space Odyssey. He cowrote the...
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