I thought, of course this is my business. The child doesn’t belong to you; she belongs to herself. She deserves to be treated with respect, honor, love, and tenderness. We all do. I

Rational discussion presupposes rational motivations, yet claims to virtue are always attempts to place rational masks over nonrational urges.

Psalms 8: “Thou madest him [man] to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passes through the paths of the seas.” The emphasis—that beasts of the field are things—is in the original.

But mythologies of all times and all places tell us that those who enter the abyss and survive can bring back important lessons.

In the eighteenth century, de Crévecoeur wrote, “As long as we keep ourselves busy tilling the earth, there is no fear of any of us becoming wild.”

We would be better off if we were to act in our own best interest. No one benefitted from my childhood. No one benefits from rape. Hitler benefited no one, not even himself. Who benefits from the production of plutonium? Who benefits from the production of weapons of mass destruction? Who benefits from the use of pesticides? Who benefits from the e

What else do we forget? Do we think about nuclear devastation, or the wisdom of producing tons of plutonium, which is lethal even in microscopic doses for well over 250,000 years? Does global warming invade our dreams? In our most serious moments do we consider that industrial civilization has initiated the greatest mass extinction in the history o

Just as at Auschwitz, or in other situations of perpetual trauma, circumstances can be created in which people are so oppressed and their options so narrowly circumscribed that it pays to exploit others, to make certain that they themselves get the easier job or the last scrap of potato, to make certain they can hop like a frog longer than the peop

Jim Nollman,