Nancy Pearcey

America is a knowledge-based society, where information counts as much as material resources. Therefore those with the power to define what qualifies as knowledge - to determine what are the accepted facts - wield the greatest social and political power.

Modern secular thought has its own dualism: It treats only the physical world as knowable and testable, while locking everything else - mind, spirit, morality, meaning - into the realm of private, subjective feelings. The so-called fact/value split.

New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.