Jessica > Recent Status Updates

"Statistics in the discipline of ecology is dominated by null hypothesis significance testing. Apart from the construction of confidence intervals, it is almost the only statistical method taught in ecology at the undergraduate level. In leading ecological and conservation journals...null hypothesis testing has been used in approx. 90% of articles 1978-2001, although this proportion was only 80% in 2005."

evolutionary optimism - the belief that things will continue to improve to utopia

"The result is that death, which was always part of the natural transience of the good creation, gains a second dimension, which the Bible sometimes calls 'spiritual death.'"

"History alone, certainly as conceived within the modern Western world and placed on the Procrustean bed of science, which (rightly) observes the world as it is, appears to leave us like the Children of Israel waiting in fear on the shore of the Red Sea."

No: in order to explain historically how all the early Christians came to the belief they held, that Jesus had been raised, we have to say this: that the tomb was empty, except for some grave clothes, and that they really did see and talk with someone who gave every appearance of being a solidly physical Jesus, though a Jesus who was strangely changed, more strangely than they were able fully to describe.

On the next morning he rose early and resumed his march toward Rome.

The men around Dr. Abulafia-and they were the most persuasive in Safed-had a clear vision of what might happen to world Judaism if the rabbis prevailed.

Can Judaism prevail if it is tied to a narrow interpretation of the law as conceived and administered by a body of older rabbis?

"In circulating this necessary but unpleasant letter we are not concerned with his faulty decision in the Damascus case."

No food is cooked, no fire lighted, no lamp lit.

How can a man and a woman live together in harmony?

"In later years certain liberal philosophers of Judaism would deplore the fact that the iron-willed German ever reached Safed, for after he completed his codification the Jews of the world were hemmed in by a body of law so specific and rigid that any normal growth seemed impossible; harsh critiques were written of Eliezer bar Zadok's deadening influence on Jewish thought"

"Even the birds came no more, for the grasses that had grown centuries before now perished in the desiccated air; the mound had become part of a desert."

"The cross, we note, already had a symbolic meaning throughout the Roman world, long before it had a new one for Christians."