As most any naturalist with a healthy interest in words does, I’ve long enjoyed the past-time of venereal – or collective – nouns. From the traditional, widely known, and more-or-less official – an exhalation of larks, a school of fish, a pack of wolves – to the playful and decidedly unofficial – an aroma of […]
When I was at university, I had the privilege of studying under the direction of one of the century’s great scholars of religious history, Dr. Richard Rohrbaugh. Professor Rohrbaugh specialized is the analysis of the early Christian period through the paradigm of socio-cultural anthropology. For all the things I learned from him I shall never […]
They were special books – you could tell that just from the fact that they were kept in an unique set of shelves all by themselves in my middle school’s library. And of course by their size – they were so large that the set of shelves in which they were kept had a slanted […]
A friend of mine once asked “why don’t people watch insects the same way they watch birds?” It’s a fair question. After all, many insects – such as butterflies and a good many beetles – are distinctively patterned or colored in such a way that an amateur could learn to identify them on sight – […]