Spiritual Envy: Michael Krasny’s Agnostic Quest
One of our premier interviewers, host of KQED’s Forum, talks to RD Senior Editor Lisa Webster about atheists, God, his parents’ Judaism, and writing a book without answers.
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Evangelical Islamophobia as American as Apple Pie
According to one author there is something unique about American antipathy to Islam that differs substantially from earlier campaigns against Catholics, Jews and other religious minorities.
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Beyond Christianity or Creed: Religion of Realism from a Chicago Cop
There’s a scene in Martin Preib’s recent and remarkable collection of essays where he describes pulling over to the side of the road to scribble down a note, deep in conversation about the work of Walt Whitman, about what that work accomplished and how. “My terms are useless:…
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Secret Sequel: New Age “Mind Cure” Misses the Point
The ancients were wise to life’s tragedies too. Some things do, apparently, go badly. (They could hardly think otherwise, living during that long period of history in which death was associated with the young, not the old.) So, their instruction was to ‘go with the flow’ even when that is hard to stomach. Theirs is not a relentless optimism, expecting everything, like Byrne’s. Rather, the Stoics advocated expecting nothing, but working at everything.
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Web 8.0: The Return of the Human
Humanity may be a mystery, but what about the human who virtually enters a spec of dust and is able to learn the mysteries of dustness? Doesn’t this kind of leap require us to adopt a kind of awe and reverence for the mysteries outside the human as well?
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A Rationalist’s Ghost Story
I’d always considered myself a rationalist, but over the next twelve months a series of odd events would challenge the way I viewed the world. Many people suggested I write a book about my experiences, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that for the simple reason that if you tell someone, especially a stranger, that you might have a ghost in your house, the probability of that person thinking you’re crazy is rather high.
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Little ‘Value’ in New Harris Book
Sam Harris latest, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, is undermined by poor scholarship, ad hominem attacks and an obsession with religion.
Pox Americana: Franzen’s Tragic Vision
There is nothing small-bore or contemptible about a novel that explores the wonder and heartbreak of romantic love against the distant thunder of imperial warfare.
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Was George W. Bush the Last Hippie?
The political types, both right and left, have managed to create the idea that the sixties were a time of leftist, collectivist politics. But this was actually an era of mad individualism, not collectivism, of romantic essentialism, not social construction. The old lefties failed in their every effort to organize… and a lot of old hippies are Ron Paul types today.
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The High Church of Art
If art is the new religion, then museums are the new temples; temples uniquely suited to the vagaries of spirituality in the modern age.
That is the suggestive idea explored in Marcia Brennan’s new book, Curating Consciousness. Brennan introduces us to James Johnson Sweeney…
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