Where is reason amid a season of holy days?
Many of you probably didn’t realize it, but we reached the high (or as you may see it, low) point of winter on Friday afternoon, at 2:20 p.m., when we passed through the winter solstice. Many of you probably didn’t realize it, but we reached the high (or as you may see it, low) point of winter on Friday afternoon, at 2:20 p.m., when we passed through the winter solstice. In the Northern Hemisphere, that is. In the Southern Hemisphere it is the summer solstice. I once asked my colleague Howard Troxler, an astronomy buff, to explain seasons to me and he finally got it across that the Earth tilts 23 degrees on its axis, making its northern or “top” part closer to the sun for half of the year and its southern or “bottom” part the other half. From that, daylight saving time notwithstanding, we get the apparent lengths of days including Friday’s (the shortest) and the summer solstice (the longest). (Now Troxler will write me and explain to me how I got it wrong, but I was trying, honest.) A
