What Time Is It?

This may seem like a simple question, but there are many ways to answer it: my phone tells me it’s 6:18 a.m.; the calendar tells me it’s May 25; my prayer book tells me it’s the thirty-fifth day of Easter; the sun tells me it’s just past sunrise, and my brain tells me it’s time for another cup of coffee. The differences between these answers may seem trivial, but the standard by which we tell time determines to a profound extent what events we see as significant or newsworthy. Indeed, one of the reasons our culture has an unhealthy obsession with the news is because its sense of time is off…