"It's the gravity that shapes the large scale structure of the universe, even though it is the weakest of four categories of forces." -Stephen Hawking
Galaxies don’t just exist in isolation in our Universe, but are often found bound together as a part of even grander structures. Our own Milky Way is bound in a galactic group (our local group), nearby are larger groups and galaxy clusters, and on still larger scales, cosmic superclusters appear to encompass as many as 100,000 individual galaxies.
"On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise." -Paul Ricoeur
Ask anyone who's looked up at a dark sky on a clear, moonless night, and you'll immediately hear tales about how incomprehensibly vast the Universe is.
Heaven and Hell is
We Are Nearly Darkness. These days we are feeling that way too, as if caught in a riptide taking us farther and farther out to sea as night falls. Darkness surrounds us. We ingest it, flail at it, try to push it away as we navigate an out-of-control pandemic, a perverted and structurally corrupt presidency, and a global climate emergency that, if unchecked, will destroy us all.
These fine essays, written over the last twenty years, touch on all-too-familiar themes of racism, exclusion, and ecosystem abuse and destruction. Our country has genocide, slavery, and land theft in its otherwise virtuous veins, and now in the tarnished unfolding of the Anthropocene, we are living in an age of consequences. It has become clear that we have confused “having” with “being.”