Our Last “Genius” Stephen Hawking is Gone… Cause for Worry Or Inspiration?
Our last genius, Stephen Hawking, died early Wednesday morning at his home in Cambridge, England…
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Enlightenment Values Aren’t Just the Solution to Racism, They’re Also the Problem
The slaughter of nine worshippers in a Charleston church once more forces us to have…
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How Robert Bellah (1927-2013) Changed the Study of Religion
Over fifty years ago Bellah rocked the field of religious studies with a pioneering study on Japanese religion. When he died suddenly this past week he was working on a book that was set to land him as a pioneer yet again.
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A Long History of Blaming the Jews
“Antisemitism” is a problematic term. Of course we know what it means—prejudice against or hatred…
Read MoreAtheism is Doomed
Is militant atheism, like religious fundamentalism, the last gasp of a dying worldview?
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Secular End Times & Apocalyptic ‘Roosters’
In his new book, Richard Landes argues that in addition to the obvious End Timers many secular movements—the French Revolution, Marxism, Nazism—can be better understood as millennialist or apocalyptic.
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Why the Hell Does Hell Still Matter?
In a nation founded on the radical premise of republican virtue without a monarch to rule over the people what would keep people in line? Hell.
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The Kids Are All Wrong: Texas Tosses The Enlightenment
It seems to have been meant to be—and not in that predestination way. After endless months of testimony and debate, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE), led by Don McLeroy, passed…
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The Polite Islamophobia of the Intellectual
Islamophobia is an ideological project and it is not limited to cartoons. It is not the purview of the political right. It is not a Zionist conspiracy. It is not an evangelical polemic. It draws on the uncertainty about Islam that pervades the American public square since 9/11.
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Ian Buruma on the Political Excesses of Religion
Few writers could to pick a theme as grand as the global interplay of democracy and religion and hope to utter the final word on the subject. In his latest book, Ian Buruma, a journalist and historian with over a dozen seminal books to his…
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