The first time I heard of George Lakoff's work, I didn't like it. From that second-hand account, I thought he was saying we shouldn't try reasoning with people about politics... which I've always considered a duty, so far as possible, since the alternatives seem to come down to: force, fear, or manipulation.



Lakoff is much more complex than that. First off, he's working from a well-established principle: that human thinking, about anything more complicated than primary concrete… Continue

I've naturally been through a multitude of Historical Jesus books. (That's the kind of Jesus we've been given, after all: a man half-concealed by the gospels that claim to reveal him, and otherwise rather disdainfully undocumented.) Many of these books have been wonderful, deeply illuminating... and yet they, like the gospels themselves, have no satisfactory answer to that basic question: "What on Earth was he doing here?!"



I have an equal difficulty with "Christians"-- as in "people… Continue