Professor may have solved the Amelia Earhart mystery

Aviator Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared on July 2, 1937 as they attempted to fly around the world. Their fate has remained a mystery for more than eighty years.

But an anthropology professor now says that human bones found on the remote Pacific island of Nikumaroro are likely hers. His research indicates that she was more similar to the skeletal remains than 99 percent of the individuals in a sample of 2,776 people.

Earhart was a brilliant and celebrated pilot. She was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean and the first person to fly over both the Atlantic and the Pacific. But her skills and resolve were apparently insufficient to save her from a lonely death.

Meanwhile, another nor’easter is expected to bring power outages to the northeastern US. A person with the mumps attended a national cheerleading competition in Texas last month, potentially exposing thousands of people from thirty-nine states. And a seventeen-year-old girl was killed by gunfire at an Alabama high school yesterday.

We are the most technologically-advanced society in human history. But the mortality rate for celebrities and the rest of us is still 100 percent. Nature is still more powerful than we are; a disease first documented more than twenty-five centuries ago has still not been eradicated; at least twenty-seven people have now been killed in school shootings so far this year.

Human history proves that human reason cannot solve the greatest problems humans face. But that’s not the end of the story.

What Elihu and Socrates had in common

Tucked away in a seldom-noticed chapter in the Book of Job is a profound truth claim. A young man named Elihu is exasperated that his older colleagues have not been able to persuade Job that his supposed sins are responsible for his plight. So, he offers his own approach.

In Job 32:8 he asserts: “It is the spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand.” Elihu was not the first…