This started out as merely a spark as I was reading Richard Dawkins’s controversial 2008 masterpiece, The God Delusion, for the second time and I picked up on a reference to Love Thy Neighbor, a 1995 article by John Hartung and subsequently my curiosity was wondrously rewarded.

I was next led to Hartung’s beautiful website for a copy of the article and what was to be my note to a friend has been transformed into this testimonial to what I found. There were actually two articles, the original Love Thy Neighbor , a second piece on Prospects for Existence and what Hartung calls a cut-to-the-chase essay entitled The Message of Evolution.

As I added these to my ‘things to read’ list, I searched for something more. Aside from the snippets like ‘his Ph.D. is in anthropology from Harvard’, ‘he is a Professor of Anesthesiology at the State University of New York’ and ‘half of Dr. Hartung's publications are in social science, with the rest in medicine’, I still wanted something immediate. Then I found this brief video at the bottom of his Introduction page:

A Perspective on the Future of Mankind
An Interview of John Hartung by Dr. Gerald Deas, MD of “Health Center”

(a television broadcast, Nov. 13, 2006 — it’s a wonderful 25 minutes).