I had a grand vision for an expanded vegetable garden this year. The dirt had other ideas. It was difficult to plant the seedlings we had grown and even the pumpkin seeds seemed resistant to the hard dirt. A peony…
Gossip reminds us that to be human is to be messy. Perhaps that is why we love it so. A neighbor's affair or a coworker's sudden departure can quickly become a modern-day Greek myth. There is a particular kind of…
A book found me in a used bookstore recently. I was scanning the history section looking for anything by Jill Lepore, but then a thick paperback with the stars and stripes on the spine caught my eye. It had the…
For over 2,000 years, ancient Greek people believed in Bugonia: the belief that bees could spontaneously generate from the decaying carcass of a bull. The "sweetness" of life was linked to the death of the bull's brute force. Taurus represents…
The Tower of Babel story shows people building a tower to remain centralized, to speak a common language, to reach heaven. God was ticked off at their hubris and put a stop to this endeavor by turning their single language…