SAL RESTIVO'S BLOG: THE SOCIOLOGICAL COGITO

       New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks and University of Chicago graduate (BA) has written a great deal in the public arena and now has revealed his spiritual evolution from agnostic to man of faith.   Faith came to him, he writes, through “numinous experience...moments of awe and wonder...”   He writes about moments of transcendence at the foot of a New England mountain and at Chartres Cathedredal in France.   I have stood at the foot of a mountain in New England, and in fact lived on a mountain in Vermont; and I’ve visited and written about the cathedral at Chartres.   I can imagine what Brooks must have felt at these times, but being as I am anchored to the earth I cannot be driven to awe and wonder as numinous experiences.   They did not open up vast mysteries for me as they did for Brooks.   He explains this in terms of “the emotions we feel when we are in the presence of a vast something j...

  I have called many times for an index of GDDP (Gross Domestic Disproduct) to measure the human and natural wastes that accompany the production of goods and services measured by Gross Domestic Product.   This could help offset the fact that we go stumbling along producing goods and services with no thought to the limits of natural resources. Remembering Jimmy Carter, we remember how he urged Americans to limit individual power consumption: “TURN OFF LIGHTS,” he said.   This is an example of what I call the law of marginal futulity.   Suppose we do turn off ights in our individual homes; who is going to turn off the lights in Las Vegas?   Who is even going to imagine that the lights of Las Vegas are the tip of the ice berg of our problem with assigning values and costs to using resources? Jimmy Carter’s Complicated Environmental Legacy, By Nitish Pahwa https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/12/jimmy-carter-death-environmental-legacy-cli...

  My friend Jo Boaler at Stanford posted this on LinkedIn:I have always appreciated the reporting of the Guardian newspaper in the UK. This is their analysis of recent events.I am writing to you on an ominous day for America, and for the world.Last night, in his victory speech, Donald Trump called the free press "the enemy camp". Intimidating words. But we believe that, as journalists, we can't afford to be intimidated. We have a duty to tell the truth about the man the United States has just elected as president - a man who tried to overturn a democratic election the last time he was in office, whose supreme court appointees gutted women's reproductive rights, who calls climate change a hoax, who falsely claims mass deportations will solve our economic problems, who threatens jail for his political opponents, who lies reflexively and shamelessly, and whose second administration imperils our democracy, freedoms and planet.I replied:I experienced the ...

I write this just weeks away from my 84th birthday. I don’t know that I’m more aware of my coming departure from this so-called life than I was when I was ten. I was surely aware of my ultimate fate before that. My grandmother had died when I was 8, and I have a vague recollection of learning that one of my schoolmates at about that time had been struck by lightning and killed. But I was ten when my mother found me curled up in a fetal position in the bed she shared with my father crying. She asked me what was wrong and I said “I don’t want to die.” My mother’s response was curious on reflection. She was essentiallly uneducated, an immigrant from southern Italy, and an untutored Roman Catholic who had populated our Brooklyn apartment with pictures and statues of saints and had hung crosses on the walls. Thinking back, I would have thought that she would have comforted me by pointing out that when I died I would go to heaven where I would live forever with all of my family and ...

I get my health care through the OneMed health care service. They send out occasional memos to members on health matters. Today they sent one out on: HUMAN TOUCH CAN IMPROVE YOUR HEALTH Marvin Gaye said it best, Sexual healing is something that's good for me. And he was right: Physical touch can make you happier, lower blood pressure, lessen anxiety, and even boost immunity. So whether you’re getting up close and personal with your summer crush or just hugging friends and family, remember that human interaction and touch are important — and good for your health. Following are excerpts from my The Treachery of Realities: Safeguarding Truth in the Age of Science Denial (Brill, 2025). If you are going to find meaning anywhere, it’s going to be in your community, in your networks. And it is going to involve sex or more generally sensual pleasures. We haven’t learned the first thing about sex. The first thing is that sex is everywhere all the time, like gravity (labelled “Sexi...

Yes,there are aliens who walk among us. But you wont find them at Area 51, or in secret UFO files at the Pentagon. You can find them in the Lousiana governor's office, the office of the Dean of Social Science at Harvard, and in Washington, D.C. where they boldly walk the corridors of the Congress and the Supreme Court. Louisiana classrooms now required by law to display the Ten Commandments,Stephanie Gallman and Dianne Gallagher, CNN: Wed June 19, 2024 Louisiana public schools are now required to display the Ten Commandments in all classrooms, after Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed the requirement into law Wednesday. A Harvard Dean Causes Firestorm With Call To Limit Faculty Speech, Michael T. Nietzel, June 19, 2024 Lawrence D. Bobo, Dean of Social Science and the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard, wrote an op-ed in the June 15th Harvard Crimson, in which he asked: “Is it outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct for a faculty member ...