Consider this a memo from a dying tribe.

In this morning's paper I came across this quote from novelist Cormac McCarthy: "The director had the notion that he could put the entire book up on the screen. Well, you can't do that."

A key issue in the debate around atheism concerns what happens at a cognitive level when we say we believe something.

An uncertain faith is the title of the manuscript I am currently working on. It refers to an alternate definition of faith to that used by atheists to dismiss religious believers, namely, belief without evidence.

Readers of Things Fall Apart will recall the moment in the penultimate chapter of  the novel when the gathering of the people of Umuofia is rudely interrupted by messengers from the white man. The messengers are confronted by Okonkwo, who happens to have taken a position at the very edge of the gathering.

The incapacity of the mind–or rather of the Western mind culturally trained to succeed and strive–to conceive of reality. We are not taught to see what is, but to dream, long, hope, desire, strive, reach for a perfection (physical, intellectual, financial, social) that does not exist outside of our projections and the standards of the society where we are born.