Famously posing a peculiar problem of translation, names are a necessary feature of our academic craft. We like to call…
The poverty of atheism
humanism
Man dies again!
"Man dies again.” Or so might one entitle a tabloid version of Stefanos Geroulanos’s excellent work on the history of…
Religion, science, and the humanities: An interview with Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Barbara Herrnstein Smith is a distinguished literary scholar at both Brown and Duke, who, since her undergraduate days, has had…
Hatred and humanism
“Some of our comrades conceive this humanism as though it were a young, fair-haired girl walking through a scented meadow,…
Antihumanism and religion
One of the things that intellectual historians show us, although often only implicitly, is the fluidity of the terms of…
Secularism, atheism, antihumanism
In a 1956 text on ethics and literature, Emmanuel Levinas offered the following diagnosis of the philosophical trends of his…
Humanists as cultural agents
Without art, Victor Shklovsky writes in "Art as Technique," "life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's…
The ruse of “secular humanism”
Discussions of the secular can often be peculiarly remote. Whenever secularism is imagined as unbelief, or political neutrality, or an…
A case of heteronomous thinking
As a story, A Secular Age rivals Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (which curiously it ignores) and…
Sex & aggression
I want to raise some questions about Taylor’s account of “our moral landscape” after the mainstreaming of the sexual revolution…