Necessary Being News Today

Death is the mother of religion. Would faith ever have been born if not for life’s only inevitability for all: The Reaper? As the first Homo sapiens discovered, we are all renters in life until we buy the farm. So, even before the wheel, mortals invented the first life insurance policy: religion ...

From the blog of Walter Hilliger at The Times of Israel

The Essential Octavia Butler She created vivid new worlds to reveal truths about our own. Here’s where to start with her books. By Stephen Kearse Published Jan. 15, 2021Updated Feb. 18, 2021 Octavia Butler walked a singular path. A writer from her poverty-stricken childhood to her death in 2006 at the age of 58, she committed her life to turning speculative fiction into a home for Black expression. In her hands, the genre felt capacious and infinite. “I wrote myself in,” she told The New ...