Now in his seventies, Robert Trivers is no longer a prodigy but still acts the enfant terrible. He taught himself calculus when he was 14 and wrote and published a series of papers that revolutionized evolutionary theory when he was still a graduate student at Harvard. He was awarded the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences by the Royal Swedish Academy of…
Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, was named Piyush by his Indian immigrant parents and raised as a Hindu. His conversion to Christianity, he told an interviewer from Christianity Today, took seven years. It began when his grandfather died and he turned to books for insights into the mysteries of life and death—first the Bible, then the writings of…
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you find Western secular culture a breeding ground for the worst human values and qualities, from unquenchable selfishness and greed to unconscionable meanness and hard-heartedness. You are disgusted by the moral free-for-all that profits no one except the insanely rich. You hunger for a saner world than secular culture fosters—one committed to enriching, rather…
Obsessed as they are with weights, measures, and other materialistic minutiae, scientists, we are often told, miss the mark when it comes to discerning the intangible values that give life its true meaning—and are sometimes an active force for evil. “We murder to dissect,” the poet Wordsworth said. Left to their own devices, scientists build super-weapons or harvest embryos for…
Anyone who has been to a meeting of a 12-Step Program has heard the saying “Let Go and Let God.” Its roots are in the Bible—“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding,” reads Proverbs 3:5; “In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths”—but a more proximate source is…
I met Steve some seven years ago when I hired his company to do some work in my home. There was an instant connection. We seemed to relate to life in the same way and at times would find ourselves deep in conversation about the true meaning of life. When you spend a lot of time at someone’s home, you…
