Lofton tells me she shares with Jonathan Z. Smith the view that difference is the beginning of any good conversation.…
Leigh Eric Schmidt
Leigh Eric Schmidt is Edward Mallinckrodt University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Previously, he was the Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (2005), Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (2000), Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (1995), and Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (1989). His latest book is Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (Basic Books, 2010).
History and the historyless
Buried in the middle of William James’s chapter on “The Sick Soul” in The Varieties of Religious Experience is the…
A religious history of American neuroscience
Not long ago, researchers wired up the atheist Richard Dawkins with a helmet that would create magnetic fields partially simulating…
That weird strange thing
That Charles Taylor’s massive book on the malaises and predicaments of secularity could be taken by so many distinguished intellectuals…