Columnists, In Person

September 1st, 2025

What psychologists can learn from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.

I have been reading a lot of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest, geologist, paleontologist, and philosopher who was active in his career during the first half...

July 31st, 2025

What I learned from building a model ship

By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.

“I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky.” With these words, John Masefield begins his best known poem, “Sea Fever.” They capture the draw that...

June 30th, 2025

When stories connect

By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.

Midday in Boston and my wife and I are standing on the platform at Charles Street waiting for the inbound Red Line train. We are going only two stops to Washington Street to...

June 3rd, 2025

You are here: Our lives with maps

By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.

You are here. Without maps, you would still be here, but you wouldn’t know where here is. Or there, or how to get from here to there. I don’t know when I first had this...

April 30th, 2025

Reading Vonnegut in the playroom

By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.

Visiting the grandkids is always a special treat and we make the day-long drive as often as we can. As the years roll on, our visits change from participating in the routines...

April 1st, 2025

The president and the poet

By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.

It had snowed heavily the night before, and the day dawned with a frigid wind and blinding sunlight that glinted off the blanket of white spread out in all directions where the...

March 1st, 2025

Still hoping for the world we want

By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.

It was two in the morning when a chartered bus carrying 30 idealistic teenagers drove up to a hangar at New York’s Kennedy airport where a propeller-driven Iceland Airlines...

January 31st, 2025

Remembering Jimmy Carter

By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.

There are worlds within worlds. Galaxies fill the cosmos. Stars fill the galaxies and planets spin around the stars. The earth, what we call our world, is just one of them, and...

January 2nd, 2025

O Christmas Tree

By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.

As I write these words in early December, what is left of our small Thanksgiving turkey sits in the fridge holding one more meal for two. Our Christmas tree, artificial this...

December 2nd, 2024

When we knew for certain

By Alan Bodnar Ph.D.

Remember when we knew for certain that the moon would always follow us if we kept looking at it through the side window of the car? “Keep looking,” Mom said, “and it will...