The theme this week is simple – yet not so simple: All will be well. 

It’s about systemic thinking – how all things rhyme and relate to other things, and how it’s merely a (necessary) convenience to identify “things” in the first place – beginning as infants with our mother’s breast.  

his post is something of an outlier, in that it concerns a member of my family. But it’s also an interesting story about a kind of cultural citizenship: a long-hidden act of witness.   And it fits right in with a theme I’ve pursued (unconsciously it seems, yet it’s a clear red threat) in various essays going back thirty years: the theme of secular resurrection. By that I mean discovering significance in the lives of forgotten people. 

Causality, the domain of thought in which we assign causes and effects in the world, is a an unavoidable morass  – hence its close connection to another of our “gateway concepts,” complexity. Inside the Liberal Arts devotes a chapter to each. But like complexity, causality is a manageable morass, in which we ultimately set the terms and frame the questions. If we follow the contours of nature in doing so, it’s because we have no choice: that’s what we’re dealing with here. And if  answers to these questions are elusive, at least we can understand why they elude us.