David Brooks's op-ed, "The Neural Buddhists," is premised on a variety of conceptual confusions that are worth trying to clear…
Let’s get clear about materialism
culture
Polyandry now!
I wonder about those Lost Boys of fundamentalist Mormonism, the boys ejected as teenagers from their families and the Fundamentalist…
Reforming culture
What exactly was wrong with the Yearning for Zion ranch---home to a group identified with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus…
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…
The cognitive revolution and the decline of monotheism
To appreciate the cultural impact of the “cognitive revolution” discussed by David Brooks in his New York Times op-ed column…
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…
A Catholic Modernity?
Some readers of Sources of the Self, particularly its last few chapters, might have wondered how exactly Taylor’s indirect plea…
The new universalism
There is a sense among those who are watching that the ground is shifting in U.S. constitutional jurisprudence with respect…
The mundane against the secular
The research university has long been at the heart of European, and thence global, secularism---if we think of secularism as…