Category: passage

Princess Diana’s Funeral, Played and Replayed

The year 2023 is about to turn into 2024. The Crown, a televisions series treatment of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, is currently playing on Netflix. The series includes two funerals, one for Princess Diana, the other for her deceased lover, Dodi Fayed. The funerals occur in season 6, episode 4. The current media…


Consuming Ritual

  Sacred Rites and Rituals, a forty-five minute film produced by FilmRoos for A&E’s Ancient Mysteries Series helped shape public attitudes toward ritual. These attitudes are now echoed by other media presentations of ritual. I was one of the scholarly consultants for the film and know the process that lies behind the production. I kept…


The Origin of Evil

Long, long ago the first animal ate the second animal. Then the first animal became food for the third animal. All animals hungered, hunted, ate, and became food for other animals. The world was an epic food orgy—a bone-crushing, blood-drinking drama unburdened with self-consciousness or guilt. Over eons and eons animals evolved into primates, then…


Bury me where?

I have retired five times. Now I’m blogging about the little things to which life and death appear to be tethered. Some call Big Questions “religious;” others, “spiritual.” Both terms are troublesome, so I try to avoid them. I don’t believe in blogs any more than I believe in what most people call religion. Too…