Sarah Hammerschlag: I read two of your essays, “An (Un)Natural History: Tracing the Rhinoceros Horn in Egypt” and “Occult Epidemics,”…
Irreverently reverent
materialism
Science and religion across Senegal and Japan
Robyn d’Avignon: Levi, the prompt for our conversation suggests that dialogue between science and technology studies (STS) and religious studies has…
De-provincializing Oprah
In Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, Kathryn Lofton holds up a lustrous mirror to the polymorphously perverse dynamics of…
The sun shone fiercely through the window at Starbucks (Part II)
Soon after reading Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, I turned to Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals. It is…
The sun shone fiercely through the window at Starbucks (Part I)
Let us recognize, from the outset, the delicious perversity of inviting comments upon comments about the comments about Charles Taylor’s…
Understanding disenchantment
Jane Bennett’s sympathetic yet critical commentary on my essay "What is Enchantment?" (published in the volume Varieties of Secularism in…
After atheism (Part II)
In my last post, I made the claim that I wasn’t an atheist. That’s a complicated claim. Atheism, despite being…
Let’s get clear about materialism
David Brooks's op-ed, "The Neural Buddhists," is premised on a variety of conceptual confusions that are worth trying to clear…
The aesthetics of neural Buddhism
The first three postings in this series remind us how complex the individual topics of cognitive science, Buddhism, and religious…