animals 8
A Formidable Formative Institution – The Fair Marches On
You have to cut through the glitzy, loud elements—the carnival rides and the tractor pulls and the cotton candy—to see the heart of the fair...
Human Dominion in Kipling’s Just So Stories
Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 Just So Stories are a delightful anomaly—they feel like folk tales but were largely invented by Kipling himself as bedtime stories for his eldest daughter, Josephine.
No Good without Evil: G.W. Leibniz’s Reconciliation of Animal Suffering with God
A robin or chicken that seems to die in a totally senseless way is viewed by humans only in its individuality, without seeing the universal order underlying this suffering.
Politics and the Petting Zoo
What if our expectations of politicians whom we mock or despise are simply unrealistic and guided by the standards of this world? The faith of some regular Americans in their…
Thinking Like a Lamb
Today I make a COVID resolution: I will learn to be more lamby-like, as Carl would say: to think like a lamb.
Better to Have Loved and Lost: A Review of Peter Wohlleben’s The Inner Life of Animals
If I can value the inner lives and the outer well-being of animals and plants and rocks and stars, because I can see the inherent beauty and goodness that something…
From Dogs to Fur Babies–and Back Again
As Edward Abbey said, “When a man’s best friend is a dog, then that dog has a problem.”
On Pigeons
Two autumns ago you couldn’t take a dozen steps without tripping over the decapitated corpse of a pigeon. There’d be one lying on the hard packed gravel of the driveway…
