Important Friday Links

If I could write half as well as the people in the following links, I would be a very happy man.  First, This is a very thought-provoking article by Marilyn Robinson, even if you don't subscribe to christianity or religion in general.

Another answer, favored by those who claim to be defenders of science, is that religion formed around the desire to explain what prescientific humankind could not account for. Again, this notion does not bear scrutiny. The literatures of antiquity are clearly about other business.
Some of these narratives are so ancient that they clearly existed before writing, though no doubt in the forms we have them they were modified in being written down. Their importance in the development of human culture cannot be overstated. In antiquity people lived in complex city-states, carried out the work and planning required by primitive agriculture, built ships and navigated at great distances, traded, made law, waged war, and kept the records of their dynasties. But the one thing that seems to have predominated, to have laid out their cities and filled them with temples and monuments, to have established their identities and their cultural boundaries, to have governed their calendars and enthroned their kings, were the vivid, atemporal stories they told themselves about the gods, the gods in relation to humankind, to their city, to themselves.

Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred, Marilyn Robinson,  The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 12, 2012 via The Teeming Brain

Also, most of the blog posts by Jacob Bacharach make me teem with envy.  I want to be this kind of fabulous gay writer.

Teeming Brain, where I found the Marilyn Robinson quote above, is also pretty thought-provoking.