If one aspect of religiosity in America is the belief in America, then scholars of religion would do well to…
Everything Everywhere All at Once as religious experience
religious experience
William James, phenomenology, and the embodiment of religious experience
What I will show in the following is the ways in which, because James relies on narrative accounts of religious…
The pathologies of religious freedom
In the preface to his 1947 essay, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty…
Prayer, imagination, and the voice of God—in global perspective
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is a psychological anthropologist and a Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her work explores how people…
Is this anything or is this nothing?
The New York Times opinion piece by David Brooks, titled "The Neural Buddhists," drives a wedge between mystical and "revealed"…
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…
Which cognitive revolution?
David Brooks, in his New York Times op-ed column "The Neural Buddhists," offers speculations about how the "cognitive revolution" will…
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…
Medical materialism revisited
A century ago, in "Religion and Neurology," the opening chapter of The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James argued against…
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…