First, you need a name. Not just any name. A weird name: a Biblical misspelling, maybe, or an invocation of…
The Oprahfication of Obama
spirituality
Heraclitean spirituality: divine conflict
From the vertiginous summit of his virtue, and against all evidence to the contrary, Heraclitus informs us that "it is…
Always put one in the brain
Let me assure you. Ongoing neurological studies will not dramatically change religious belief or practice. As Robert Bellah notes in…
Psychoanalysis as spirituality
What are our moral and spiritual sources? In his magnificent and magnanimous recent book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor investigates…
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…
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…
Belief, spirituality and time
Charles Taylor, in his magisterial book on the Secular, periodically engages a constituency he calls immanent materialists. I would like…
Repossessing the past
By some sort of happy coincidence—or to use the surrealist term referenced by Jeremy Biles, “objective chance”—I watched Youth Without…
Well done better than well said
The Super Bowl is an annual ritual celebration of the classical virtues embodied in the game of football, virtues that…