An annoying but necessary habit of critical thinkers (one of many, no doubt) is making connections between seemingly disparate things. Another is making distinctions within seemingly unified ones. The idea, of course, is to strike some sort of balance: to understand both how things connect and how they do not. 

I’m old enough to remember when college and university bookstores contained a lot of interesting books and journals – and that’s pretty old. Even at my small liberal art college, the bookstore was a marvel. And my favorite holdover volume from those years (aside from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, which I wrote about in “The Thrill of Reference”) is a lovely curiosity titled Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, by F.E. Peters, published in 1967 by New York University Press. 

Recent events in the Middle East – and over the decades preceding October 7th and the Israeli war in Gaza – have given me pause to consider a dense thicket of ideas as I try to understand conflicting viewpoints.  It’s a controversy that many people come to from a deeply personal place; but I’m not one of them, and in considering so deep and fraught an issue as Israel/Palestine, affecting so many people, the personal only goes so far. Which is, in fact, the main point of this post – but I’ll get back to that in a moment.