William Pike buys a new bible and after test driving the same version online, returns to the bound version:
Before me, in my hands, is a culmination of century upon century of Jewish and Christian history, thought, and sacrifice. The crinkly pages and linen cover are physical reminders that I am holding something sacred and worthy of my attention and care. Perusing the pages I join an uninterrupted line of scholars of all stripes who turned leaf after leaf in a lifelong search for truth and inspiration. The book becomes a companion, not merely a tool or momentary attraction, but a very part of me.
And in truth, isn’t that what we hope for from our books, sacred or otherwise?
It's December, and if you celebrate Christmas that means it's time to kill a tree, let it languish in your living room for a week, and then toss it on the curb. An estimated 32 million trees suffer this fate in America every year. The alternative—buying an artificial PVC tree from China—is even worse.
But you don't have to go treeless. In Los Angeles, The Living Christmas Company will bring you a live, potted Christmas tree for the holiday, pick it up when you're done with it, and replant it. …Their fleet of delivery trucks runs on biodiesel, of course, and they'll even pick up any Goodwill donations you have while they're at it.
Ken Croswell captures the beauty of the Milky Way:
Heavy elements are … essential for life: Witness the oxygen we breathe, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. When a star explodes in a lesser galaxy, this raw material for life shoots out into space at millions of miles an hour and is lost.
But in the Milky Way, the elements encounter interstellar gas and dust and are restrained by the strength of the galaxy's immense gravitational field. These impediments slow their speed, so they can enrich star-forming gas clouds with the ingredients for new generations of stars and planets. That's what happened 4.6 billion years ago, when the sun and the Earth emerged from a now-vanished interstellar nebula.
Thomas G. Casey explores our cultural infatuation with the Leonard Cohen song and its many iterations:
Right now there are about 200 cover versions of the song available in various languages. … How did a song with so many biblical references (none of which refer to the New Testament) become ubiquitous? How did a lyrical, slow-moving tune become popular in an era when aggressive percussion and insistent drum-beats power pop songs? Why has the song been used to create atmosphere and mood in the soundtracks of many movies and TV shows? Why can’t people get enough of it? …
One reason that “Hallelujah” appeals is that it gives voice—and song—to the spiritual hunger of millions who find it difficult or impossible to identify with orthodox expressions of their longings.
This song expresses their human fragility and their desire to be released from the shallowness of our age, which offers substandard spiritual fare. They search; they desire to reconnect with the transcendent, even though their search is often handicapped by an astonishing spiritual inarticulateness. The danger is that a lack of spiritual anchors will condemn them to aimless drifting or submersion in the inescapable sameness of a culture for which all forms of spirituality are of equal indifference, a culture not rooted in the definite contours offered by religious faith.
Lisa Katayama interviews banking veteran Hope Neighbor on her mission to improve the way we give:
While it would make the most sense for someone to take their donation dollars to the highest impact organization within a particular cause, only about a third of donors do any research when making a charitable gift. They're much more likely to spend time evaluating choices about jobs, business investments, or vacation plans with their family. Even those who do research charities only do so 63% of the time to validate a choice they've already made.
Laura Miller defends the novels of Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson. She uses this quote from C.S. Lewis as the cornerstone of her argument:
[Bad writing] is immediately recognizable. 'My blood ran cold' is a hieroglyph of fear. Any attempt, such as a great writer might make, to render this fear concrete in its full particularity, is doubly a chokepear to the unliterary reader. For it offers him what he doesn't want, and offers it only on the condition of his giving to the words a kind and degree of attention which he does not intend to give. It is like trying to sell him something he has no use for at a price he does not wish to pay.
The Dish 