I've seen it happen to so many, including loved ones in the course of my life; why shouldn't it happen to me, except for a false sense of security? Namely that in eating right, exercising often, and drinking little I'm immune. I dutifully visit my doctor each year. So why did cancer happen to me?   It was the annual PSA that signaled there was a problem. I've heard of readings in the hundreds, so I assumed that with a 6.73 all was well, especially since the Mayo Clinic designates 6.50 as...

A short drive northeast of Belfast in Ireland lies the Giant's Causeway, a site both geologically and mythically fascinating. It's beautiful really, awe-inspiring, a mass of hexagonal pillars formed sixty million years ago by quick-cooling lava, there at the edge of the sea between Ireland and Scotland. Pagan lore about the place appeared well before christianity, in the legend of Finn MacCool, the Irish hero fighting the Scottish giant, Benandonner, in a contest between two Celtic lands....

For decades I used to ask my students where heaven was, then hell, and predictably they responded as one might expect, up and down respectively. Occasionally one would remark that there is no heaven or hell, but by and large their topographical sense was automatic, and conventional. There are, no doubt, many reasons for it. After all, I used to query them in the context of reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey . The poet positions the gods on the heights of Mount Olympus, a formidable terrain of...