The Questioning Librarian

Last evening I enjoyed two pieces of the human imagination that, while different on the surface, still shared a common thread. I sat down and watched the movie "The Awakening," about a woman investigating an alleged haunting; it seems a common horror film theme, but it was quite well done, with the frightening moments used just enough to heighten the tension at key points without being overblown as so many other horror films are. The other bit of human creativity was Nicole Krauss' The History of Love , a beautiful work that is hard to describe save that it is about a Holocaust survivor and the book he wrote in his youth, which he thought destroyed. The thread that ties them together in my mind is that loneliness is at the heart of the stories they tell. Loneliness is, in fact, a theme in much of human storytelling, from the loneliness of the Doctor all the way back to the loneliness of Odysseus as he was trapped on the isle of Calypso. I recalled last evening from m...

For a long time now, I've been concerned about the environment--worrying about my impact, worrying about the profligacy with which we burn through the natural resources of the earth, reading about climate change and conservation and all the implications of the millions of tons of carbon that we're sending up into the atmosphere with reckless abandon. This interest has led to, at times, some mildly obsessive behaviors,  including trundling all the recycling from the grocery store where I used to work to a collection point (picture it, the entire back end of a Jeep crammed with unsold newspapers and plastic strawberry containers). While I like to think that my behavior in this regard is a little less obsessive than it used to be, I still try to do my part. I'm fortunate that where I currently live I can mostly walk to where I need to go, so I'm happy to let my car sit while I walk to work and out for the occasional bite to eat. I still recycle as often as I can, and do s...

Usually in writing about young-earth creationism, the focus is on the damage it does to science and to science education. This is quite understandable, as the primary focus of the young-earthers is to push a narrow, sectarian, and highly unscientific worldview that has done serious harm to science education. While this is, usually, enough to worry about, I've been thinking over the past few days about the damage that creationism does to women, having read my way through a handful of feminist books in recent weeks. At first glance, one may think that this is a silly idea, but as creationism in the United States represents the worldview of reactionary elements within Christianity it also does serious harm through its portrayal of women. This may seem incidental, that the view young-earth creationism holds of women is merely collateral damage from an already harmful worldview (to say nothing of their view of homosexuality, which is, as it were, rather unevolved ), but it is important...