“It resists classification…” Language is a funny thing. Take my epigraph, for example: three words from the fourth paragraph of…
Three dots and a dash
language
Where did religion come from?
When an interviewer for the Atlantic Monthly blog asked me “What prompted you to write this book?” I apparently replied,…
Critiquing reductionism
There are reductive categories . . . that have been and should be abandoned in scholarly discourse because the terms…
On reductionism
There’s something attractive about a neat typology, and also something we seem to loathe about the compartmentalization entailed. So what…
The politics of inaccuracy and a case for “Islamic law”
Since the process of understanding divine law is not a uniform or singular one, there are multiple interpretations of what…
Crosswise logic
My previous post sought to humble the principle of non-contradiction, and thus the logic of consistency it defines, finding it inadequate for…
Separating public space
Concluding a class trip to the Supreme Court, Maureen Rigo and her class from Wickenburg Christian Academy, Wickenburg, AZ, stopped…
A rhetorical challenge
Criticism from counterterror experts targeting President Obama's recent attempt to curtail the demonization of Islam and Muslims by way of…
What ends we mean: A reply to Vincent Pecora
Pecora writes that I claim his “use of the term ‘secularization’ must be secretly eschatological” and that he “cannot escape…
The soul of academia
The concept of the soul has an important place in the conceptual apparatuses of towering figures of modern social thought…