Category: Uncategorized
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Abraham and Linsay Clancy; Imagination Creates Fact
The comparison between Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac and the Lindsay Clancy case raises a disturbing question: what happens when the mind accepts an imagined command as an unquestionable fact? In both stories, a parent is confronted with what is experienced as an authoritative command to kill a child. In Genesis, Abraham believes the command comes…
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Before They Became Enemies
Cyrus, Abraham, and the Historical Construction of the Iran–Israel Conflict When we look at Iran and Israel today, it is remarkably easy to believe that we are watching an ancient conflict. The language encourages that conclusion. Iran speaks from an Islamic revolutionary tradition. Israel defines itself as the Jewish state. Jerusalem carries sacred meaning for…
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The Professor I Never Had
I might have known Martin Noth. Not personally, perhaps, and certainly not in the life I eventually lived. But there was another life available to me once—a life that disappeared before I was old enough to choose it. I was born in Germany on February 7, 1945, while the war was still being fought above…
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“The Heart of a Shepherd.”
Far from the Madding Crowd. A young English shepherd goes to war carrying a battered copy of Far from the Madding Crowd. At home he had admired Gabriel Oak because Oak was patient, dependable, and willing to search for anything entrusted to him. In France, however, the soldier loses his faith. He watches men treated…
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A Skyscraper Speaks
A “Moment” in Time The building was chosen because it looked useful. That was the first mistake. To the mayor, it was housing. To the developer, it was opportunity. To the investors, it was dormant value. To the unions, it was work. To the city, it was proof that old office towers could be reborn…
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My Earthquake
The Night the Earth Moved I remember exactly when it happened. It was Tuesday, October 17, 1989, just before the World Series game. The time was 5:04 in the afternoon. Live cameras were already on the field when a magnitude 6.9 earthquake rocked the San Francisco Bay region. Its center was near Loma Prieta Peak…
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The God of Imagination and the God of Law
Can a God of imagination overcome the God of law? At first, the question sounds almost dangerous. It seems to divide God against Himself: one God of commandment, order, judgment, and obedience; another God of vision, mercy, possibility, and hope. But perhaps the better question is not whether imagination can defeat law. Perhaps the better…
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The War That Stayed in Europe
A Serious Alternate-History Essay A Second World War without the United States and Japan would not simply be a smaller version of the war we know. It would be a different moral universe. At first glance, the premise sounds almost reassuring. No Pearl Harbor. No Pacific War. No Bataan, no Midway, no Guadalcanal, no Iwo…
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The President’s Brain Is Missing
A Political Satire in the Age of Manufactured Reality What happens when a republic converts one man’s imagination into administrative fact? The President’s Brain Is Missing — not because the president lacks intelligence, but because grandiosity, impulsivity, contradiction, and ruptures with reality have migrated from private temperament into public policy. The real subject becomes not…
