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...Elaine Pagels. Her much honored 1979 work, The Gnostic Gospels, was one of the rare volumes of religious scholarship to find a general readership. In her new book, The Origin of Satan (Random House; $23), Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University, examines how the earliest Christians made their opponents out to be the devil. First the Jews who spurned Christ, then the Romans who persecuted his followers, then other Christians who departed from the orthodoxies of the newly consolidating church -- each group in turn, she says, appears in early Christian texts not just as a philosophical contender...
Even when a limb is gone, its place on the mental map remains, and the neurons formerly responsible for processing sensations from it occasionally fire at random-the sensory equivalent of Mickey Mouse hallucinations. The brain also attempts to make up for the deficit physically, perhaps, suggests Ramachandran, by sprouting new sets of connections. Because neurons that process information from the arm are near those that handle the face, for example, these new connections can cause a blindfolded patient to think a gentle touch on the face is really a touch on a missing fingertip. Says Ramachandran: "Reorganization can occur...
...University of Virginia violated free-speech guarantees when it refused to subsidize a student-run Christian magazine while subsidizing other student groups. And in a Fourth Amendment case, the court upheld by 6 to 3 a local school plan in Oregon that requires all student athletes to submit to random drug testing...
...songs are burly rock 'n' roll, with operatic guitar solos and propulsive drumming. Thematically, the CD portrays a world too hurt to feel, too overloaded with information to think. On I'm the Ocean, Young, in his nasally tenor, sings "Need distraction/ Need romance and candlelight/ Need random violence/ Need Entertainment Tonight." Several songs appear to allude to the suicide of rock star Kurt Cobain. On Peace & Love, for example, Young performs a duet with Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder that deals with mourning and the morning after. "I saw the dream/ I saw the wake," Vedder sings...
...sign of a civilization's slippage is the ease with which it blurs the line between tragedy and farce. Consider Justin Cartwright's Masai Dreaming (Random House; 287 pages; $23), a novel about the making of a Hollywood adventure movie with a Holocaust hook. The satirical possibilities are unnerving. Spectacular East African scenery, colorful colonials and free-range tribesmen, with the Final Solution worked in. How about Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts...