Why so stressed? Tom Ridge’s Homeland Insecurity alerts certainly hadn’t helped. Premonitions of what Bush’s bombing was going to do to neighborhoods full of people in Iraq made it worse. But then there was my particular, personal situation…(2003/03/07)

There are, it seems, people even in this country, even in this century, who honestly, unironically believe that there is an intelligent, self-conscious force above and beyond humanity and that this force — generally thought of as male, and generally called God — has a will that it exercises over us and everything in the universe. (2000.09.01)