On my bookshelf (actually, on my coffee table) is a book called The Twentieth Century.  In photos and prose, this book chronicles every year of the last century, retelling every significant event, person, and trend that shaped it.  It's an impressive piece of research and assemblage of information.
     As I sit on this April day in 2018, however, I realize that the twentieth century is now nearly twenty years behind us.  Although its centers, things such as World War II and the Cold War, have been objects of academic study for many years, its ending, the Nineties, have not.  We are only now beginning to assess them.
     And what have we found?  It's probably too soon to say, but we can offer this much:  in the big picture, not much has changed.  Technology continues to its burgeoning ways; wars continue to break out; famine continues to trouble various parts of the planet; art and music continue to evolve, and so forth.  What leaves us breathless, however, is realizing that even though the current century seems more of the same, it is also an immensely creative reimaging of who we are as human beings.  Our imagination knows no end.
     Nor does the imagination of the one in whose image we are made.  For good reason did Renassiance writer Pico della Mirandola pen his "Dignity of Man":  humanity is a well whose depth we will never fully draw.
     And given our origins, this is exactly as it should be.  Rejoice.  Rejoice in the forces, cosmic and divine, that have "conspired" to produce the human being.