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Don’t Worry, Be Happy: How Amazon, Google & Neuroscience Threaten American Buddhism

By Curtis White

…sion that Pinker gleefully celebrates reminds me of the Jacobins after the French Revolution. They kicked the priests out of Notre Dame, erected a statue to the Goddess of Reason, and then welcomed Robespierre’s notion of enlightenment: “virtue and terror.” Terror may be a hyperbolic way of describing what’s happening to American Buddhism, but the message it receives from science and capital are threatening enough. Corporate rationalism says to Bu…

The Evolution of Religion, According to Darwin

By Elizabeth Drescher

…on that sparks the natural selection insight, he was equally jarred by the French sociologist Auguste Comte to think about religion’s evolutionary stages. You borrow in the book Doug Burton-Christie’s description of Darwin as a “contemplative naturalist” to explore his sense of the sublime as “the ultimate ground for human religious sense.” What do you mean by this? How does this factor into Darwin’s evolutionary theories? In his field notebooks…

The Bleeding Heart of Muslim Europe

By Haroon Moghul

…ht flashes me back to the war over Bosnia. Are such burkas what the former French President, Mitterrand, had in mind when he told President Clinton that France would not stand for a Muslim-dominated nation in the heart of Europe? (Such words sound innocuous, but for their timing: During a genocidal war against that nation.) Over an hour in, and Sarajevo emerges beneath us, a tiny strip of buildings unfortunately planted in a helpless valley, walle…

Intelligent Design Trial Celebrates Fifth Year Reunion

By Lauri Lebo

…cott, executive director of the National Center of Science Education, made French toast for everyone Sunday morning. Plaintiff attorney Steve Harvey organized a guided tour of the Gettysburg Battlefield for all the folks from out of town. Barbara Forrest, the philosopher of science and the woman who defense attorney Richard Thompson tried to portray as an evil atheist, brought pralines and proudly showed photos of her children. Additionally, we al…

What We Saw in the Eyes of Koko the Talking Gorilla (1971-2018)

By Ed Simon

…y to use our simian cousins as representative of humanity’s baser actions. French medieval philosopher and poet Bernardus Silvestris wrote in the 12th century that the “ape becomes the image of man, but a deformed image representing man in a state of degeneracy.” Monkeys, of which the vast majority of medieval Europeans would have never seen real examples, became stock characters to symbolize human fallenness, repeated across sculpture, illustrate…

How Robert Bellah (1927-2013) Changed the Study of Religion

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…le comes from a phrase by Alexis deTocqueville, and, like the 19th century French traveler, Bellah and his colleagues were attempting to assess the moral character of American society. What they found was a profound tension between individualism and commitment to community. The religious expressions of this tension were evident: on the one hand catering to American individualism and indulgent self-expression, while providing havens of communal com…

Is ‘Western Self-Hatred’ the Problem in the Gaza War Protest Movement?

By Shaul Magid

…focus was Civil Rights; in the early 1960s it was the protest against the French-Algerian War; in late 1960s and early 1970s, Vietnam; in the 1980s, Apartheid; in the 1990s, solidarity with Afghanistan in the Afghan-Soviet war (we all wore Afghani Freedom Fighter hats in grad school); in the 2000s it was massive protests against the invasion of Iraq; economic redistribution after the crash of 2008 and Occupy in 2011; Black Lives Matter in the lat…

‘Iconoclash’ of Civilizations: Missives from the Image Wars

By Eric M. Gurevitch

…o exclude. *** In his recent book, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, the French Philosopher Bruno Latour bemoans The West’s dismissal of images, claiming the view is hypocritical and un-self-aware. He meditates on Andrea Mantegna’s 15th century depiction of Saint Sebastian, now on display at the Louvre. The painting shows Sebastian standing above the rubble that is the remainder of smashed Roman gods, as he is put to death for his Christianity….

Papal Profanity: The Vatican’s Pagan Museum

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…had the complex of Vatican Museums been completed under Pius VI, then the French looted them all. Napoleon was in charge of the Revolution’s forces in North Italy, and after he knocked off Venice he headed to Rome (the Revolution was rabidly anti-clerical in its early phases so they really had it out for the Vatican). The Papacy was forced to sign the Treaty of Tolentino in 1796, the first modern treaty in which 100 works of art were explicitly l…

Christian Nationalist Judge Strikes Down FDA-Approved Abortion Pill for Brazenly Ideological Reasons

By Andrew L. Seidel

…of liberated adults. In this way, the Sexual Revolution was more like the French Revolution, seeking to destroy rather than restore. In that same piece he referred to contraception (what he euphemistically calls “HHS mandates”) as “a continuous culture war, pitting sexual liberty against religious liberty in fights over pornography, divorce, abortion, and HHS mandates.” “Culture war” is a grossly misused term, especially when it glosses over braz…