As previous posts about The New Metaphysicals have illustrated, Courtney Bender’s spiritual but not religious subjects pose a number of…
science
A secular humanist reliquary?
A curious, and fascinating, piece in today's New York Times on the display of Galilean relics at Florence's museum of…
A Response to Susan Jacoby on the Oil Spill
Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason and a contributor to the On Faith column at The Washington Post, has recently…
Grasping for authenticity
The New Metaphysicals offers a peek into a world that I found at once pedestrian and strange, and the information…
Religion, science, and the humanities: An interview with Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Barbara Herrnstein Smith is a distinguished literary scholar at both Brown and Duke, who, since her undergraduate days, has had…
Quantum sociology and The New Metaphysicals
At first glance, Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals might appear narrow and idiosyncratic. After all, it's an ethnography of spiritual practitioners in…
Antihumanism and religion
One of the things that intellectual historians show us, although often only implicitly, is the fluidity of the terms of…
God, science and philanthropy
Nathan Schneider profiles John Templeton and the Foundation he built, in The Nation.
Secularism, atheism, antihumanism
In a 1956 text on ethics and literature, Emmanuel Levinas offered the following diagnosis of the philosophical trends of his…
Spirituality, entangled: An interview with Courtney Bender
Courtney Bender is an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University and co-chair of the SSRC’s Working Group on Spirituality,…