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However you define it, the truth implies a connection to reality that can be tested. It’s true that helium is lighter than air and that water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Science depends on being able to revisit those facts over and over without getting strangely ambiguous results. Yet things are shifting in stranger ways than anyone ever expected, as one discovers in an eye-opening article that appeared around Christmas in the New Yorker magazine. Everyone who is interested in how truth works should read Jonah Lehrer’s troubling “The Truth Is Wearing Off,” which can still be found online. (more…)

The benefits of meditation can’t be called new.  For decades the practice has been endorsed, even by mainstream medicine, as a proven means to reduce stress and produce relaxation.  In fact, if it were (more…)

As with Easter and Passover, the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad is dated by the lunar calendar. This year it falls on Feb. 15, and the time seems particularly fraught with meaning. Every time there is a crisis in the Muslim world, grudges and resentments going back almost to the beginning of the faith, in the seventh century, seem to resurface. Islam, being an all-inclusive (more…)