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Article: The Golden Age that never was. (Column)
- Article from:
- The Christian Century
- Article date:
- April 6, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 The Christian Century Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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THE TEXT for this morning's meditation is from Jared M. Diamond, a UCLA physiologist. Diamond took a chapter out of his book The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (HarperCollins) and spoke of"Ecological Collapses of Ancient Civilizalions: The Golden Age That Never Was" at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A New Guinea tribesman once told Diamond: "It's our custom that if a hunter one day kills a pigeon in one direction from the village, he waits a week before hunting for pigeons again, and then goes in the opposite direction."
Postmodernists advocate "the hermeneutics of suspicion." Fewer stay suspicious, however, of claims ...