While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most people in society say they desire nor, especially in the case of children, with their best interests.

The family is in flux, and signs of trouble are widespread. Expectations remain high. But realities are disturbing.

The academic world is one of the few places where prejudice is supposed to be totally banned, and we're politically correct on everything, but it's still a place where you can attack religion out of utter, complete, bottomless ignorance and not be considered to have done anything wrong.

Yet Buddhism is four hundred years older than Christianity, and if it's not a universal religion I don't know what a universal religion is. There's also a strong focus on selectionism and the notion that religion plays a functional role in the evolutionary process. But religion is dysfunctional all the time, as well as functional. It's not so simple.

We never get to the bottom of ourselves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love and learning.

It's clear all the way through history that practices are primary and beliefs are secondary.

The problem of the universal is difficult in every case. The universal and the particular can never be separated; they always go hand in hand.