Religion Dispatches
How can a secular state justify its desire to discriminate between married persons and single persons? What compelling state interest is served by creating such social groups? I suspect that when this debate has made its way through the courts, a new issue will have emerged: that the state has no business in the marriage business, period.
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Christopher Hitchens cannot be accused of being a name-dropper. The names come positively flinging off the pages of his newly-released memoir, Hitch-22, but can he be blamed for befriending some of the most interesting and influential figures of his time, like Salman Rushdie, Edward…
Read MoreThe week in religion, poetically…
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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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The Enlightenment was not, as is often assumed, exclusively secular. In fact, religious Protestants, Jews and Catholics played a key role in imagining a tolerant, but believing, society.
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The funeral of an atheist friend inspires examination of the Here and the Hereafter. Does death rob life of meaning or does it provide it?
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Author Bruce Feiler is back from “walking the Bible” and is roaming the country, tracing Moses’ footsteps. But in his eagerness to make the prophet into a unifying symbol, he misses the true complexity of the relationship between religion and the secular in America.
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A supergroup of philosophers gathered in New York last week to talk about religion and public life, about the “centrality of the catastrophic” in today’s political context, and about considering the “uncommon” as opposed to “common ground” as a basis for ethics.
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Everyone has it wrong regarding politics and religion: the Christian Right, Atheists, and even the Progressive Religious community. The author proposes a daring alternative.
Read MoreFrench President Sarkozy declared recently that the burqa “will not be welcome on our territory,” as it is a symbol of the enslavement of women. If the president is trying to foster equality of women, is this the best way to go about it?
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