And now having a child has been taken out of the sphere of biological determinism and placed instead in the domain of intentional action. Another option to consider and decide upon. And ... not to choose is to choose.

Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.

I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter "Nike" and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker.

And then there is Pythagoras. The legend is that the founder of theoretical mathematics was so outraged when one of his students, the haplessly gifted Hippasus, discovered irrational numbers that he sent the poor fellow out on a raft to drown, initiating a venerable tradition of professors mistreating their graduate students.

We may not need God to tell us where the world came from, but we need God to be able to live moral lives and for there to be morality in the first place.

Mother' is not an identity one can just try on for size.

Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind.