2006-04-07T06:37:00.000-07:00

Let me introduce myself. My name is Jim Connor, and I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, California. In my youth, I loved motorcycles, aerobatic flying, camping in the wind, and climbing down dangerously abandoned old mines. And girls, of course. As a boy, I used to go to Palmdale, CA., to the hills just outside of Edward's Air Force Base, and watch the rocket trails x the sky as the country inched toward space flight. Of all the crazy things, instead of going into science (I can't add or subtract without my fingers), I ended up as a member of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, for nearly ten years and lived on Native reservations in Canada and the US. Now I teach at Kean University in New Jersey, probably the most diverse college in the country. Most of my students are first timers, the first ones in their family ever to go to college. They come from Jamaica, Ghana, Puerto Rico, Peru, Colombia, the Ukraine, China, and sometimes even New York City. I write books--two of them with Harper San Francisco and one from Crown Books. The first, Silent Fire, was from Crown, a memoir giving the reasons why I left the Jesuits, and yet stayed Catholic. The second, Kepler's Witch, was a biography of Johannes Kepler, including a translation of the transcripts of his mother's trial for witchcraft, and the third, Pascal's Wager, coming out in October, is a biography of Blaise Pascal, the guy who discovered the laws of probability, did the math that made insurance companies possible, and invented one of the first computers. I'm also working on a detective novel so that I can, well, kill people.

Most of my life I've been pretty disappointed by the categories. Some people believe in religion wholeheartedly, some in science, just as wholeheartedly, some in politics, some in business. Each time I try to do that, I come up short. So, what I want to do is take a new run at the old questions: Do we have souls? What happens to us when we die? Do I really believe in God? Is the United States everything we hoped it would be? These questions will come along as the fit hits me, and I invite your comments. The point of this blog is to come up with argument, pro and con, that are new and fresh, that don't tread out the old paths, donkey like, and will be personal and concrete, rather than official and abstract. I want to explore, not preach. Each of my posts will lay out what seems right to me, and I ask that in your comments, you do the same.

Be well.

Jim Connor

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