Columnist.
Summer fades into autumn, and with it the seasonal focus on ancient faith. Muslims fast for Ramadan, seeking mercy and forgiveness, closing the last day of the observance with prayer and celebration on Eid al-Fitr. Jews blow the shofar, with its piercing cry ringing in the New Year, first with the celebration of Rosh Hashanah, when we nibble apples dipped in honey hoping for sweetness in the days ahead, and then the solemn fasting on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
Two little girls I know, age 6, showed up the other day at a public pool in Washington for a swim. They were excited by the prospect of escaping, if only for a little while, the heat pushing the thermometer close to 100.
NEW YORK CITY -- We stood together in the rain on a Sunday in late summer, most of us as protesters, some of us angrier than others, and some of us there as observers to take the temperature of anger at West Broadway and Park Place. We stood close to ground zero, as the place where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood will always be called. This was holy ground. We could feel it.
We're going to seduce them with our square footage, and our discounts, and our deep armchairs, and our cappuccino. They're going hate us at the beginning. ... But we'll get 'em in the end because we're going to sell them cheap books and legal addictive stimulants. We'll just put up a big sign: "Coming soon: a FoxBooks superstore and the end of civilization as you know it.
It's been a long time since Nietzsche announced that God is dead. But debates over the existence of God have taken on an urgency in the 21st century, mainly argued by atheists eager to take on those long-dead monks who counted the angels dancing on the head of a pin. Theology is not a popular subject at the dinner parties of urban political sophisticates; a host who says grace before a meal could curdle the gazpacho. But atheism is a fashionable topic in Washington.
A perch in the sand on a pristine beach invites a summer afternoon's reflections, and here where North Carolina's Outer Banks meet the Atlantic we're all sea-watchers, looking and listening for changes in the color and texture of the ocean, diving for shells, wondering how far from the distant Gulf of Mexico the tar balls will travel. The seas have always offered a mix of possibilities -- opportunity and threat, exploration and discovery, recreation and exploitation. But this is the summer of our discontent. We're all humbled with respect for the sea and man's place in it and by it.
