Recently, I remembered a song my friends in college sang: “Short people got no reason to live” by Randy Newman. On the surface, it is a...

According to World Data Lab, 604,988,913 people in the world, of 7.88 billion people, live in extreme poverty (https://worldpoverty.io/he...

In Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India, people celebrate a festival called Pongal. In Tamil, pongal means “boiling over.” Rice with...

Once two cats found a flatbread, tore it into halves to share, and immediately began a feud over whose portion was larger. Watching this...

All Summer in a Day is a science fiction by Ray Bradbury. The story is set in a classroom on Venus, where it always rains except for one...

Gamaliel, a Pharisee, sat in the Hebrews’ high court, the Sanhedrin. The people had brought Peter and the other apostles before the...

Chris Ofili is a British painter who includes elephant dung and porn in his paintings. In 1999, his controversial painting, The Holy...

Kovalum, a city in the southern part of India, has a store called “The True Fakes,” where one can buy imitations of Levi’s jeans, Louis...

In Latin grammar, a perfect tense refers to an action completed in the past (preterite in Latin), like the English’s simple past: I ate...

I have a regalia with three stripes, meaning I have a doctorate. I pridefully wear it once a year if I am participating in a graduation...

Prince Edward was Queen Elizabeth II’s husband. Yet, he always walked two steps behind her because she was his queen. Similarly, Queen...

In Get Smart, Maxwell Smart, aka agent 86, and an unnamed female agent, 99, fight against KAOS, an evil international organization....

We couldn’t watch television in our college dorm. My roommate loved NBA basketball. The solution: we put a mirror before the tv and...

Herod was a non-Hebrew. Strabo, a Greek geographer of Jesus’s time, wrote, “The Idumeans are Nabateans,” who were Arab people from the...

Parables can speak the truth powerfully when appropriately said. David had stolen the wife of his hired soldier, a foreigner he was to...

An authority (exousia) can mean many things – a right, permission, power, and privilege. As I write this introduction, I am sitting in...

Different rulers who visited the temple had different reactions. Alexander the Great didn’t enter the Holy or the Holy of Holies;...

One of my teachers always asked an impossible-to-answer question: “Have you stopped beating your wife?” This question can’t be answered...

Rabbis boasted that those who had not seen the Temple in Jerusalem hadn’t seen a beauty. Around 580 BC, the Babylonians destroyed and...

Two nights ago, I watched Robson Green’s visit to central Australia, where they were rounding up wild camels from the wilderness for...