Category: Posts
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Events Today in Costa Rica
My present travels in Costa Rica with the photographer Lucas Foglia, through a sequence of chance connections and exaggerated truths, landed us the opportunity to be in the press section at today’s meeting between (Nobel laureate) President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica and the two contenders for the presidency of neighboring Honduras. We understand our…
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Non-zero-sum God
Recently I had the pleasure to talk with journalist and bloggingheads.tv founder Robert Wright about his new book, The Evolution of God. Hear our conversation today at Killing the Buddha, in addition to a short essay of mine on the subject: It’s easy to focus, as many reviews have, on Wright’s theology of nonexistent god…
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Curious, Obscene, Terrifying, and Unfathomably Mysterious
I am going off to write about people. An ordinary proposition, it would seem, particularly for a person who makes a living writing for people and, typically, about people or the things they think about and create. For the next month, I’ll be joining my friend Lucas Foglia in Costa Rica to spend time with…
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Are Atheists Alright?
Today on The Guardian’s Comment Is Free > Belief section, I’ve got a little essay reprising the story I did in April for The Boston Globe on the new science of the non-religious. There’s already a pretty lively comment thread. Take a look: Atheists have an image problem. According to a study led by University…
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Science & Religion: Still Not Settled
A psychologist, an astrophysicist, and, um, a “neurotheologist” take the stage in a Brooklyn art gallery, alongside donation-priced beer, to talk about science and religion. That should about cover the bases, right? Time for some good, scientific answers for a change? Last night, Brooklyn’s second-favorite online magazine it has never heard of (look out for…
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Some Sound Economic Analysis
I know most of you have been keeping up on your Harun Yahya press releases, but for those who haven’t, you may have missed an astonishing occurrence, which I report on today on Vice magazine’s blog: You know Iceland? The tranquil little island nation northwest of Ireland that looks like a flying cow without legs?…
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Nonviolence from the Unlikeliest of Places
What does it take to imagine that nonviolent approaches to conflict might be possible? Millennia-old religious traditions? A prophet? Common sense? Certainly the last place one would expect to find it: a race of hardened warriors in a hardened land, where a gun is part of the common attire and tribal feuds last for generations.…
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Give Up Now, Young Writer
I was 15 when Kurt Vonnegut blew my mind. Good timing. I had never read anything so fantastically alive as Cat’s Cradle, his apocalyptic story of invented religion in a banana republic. At the time, I had just recently converted from being an obsessive TV-watcher to, inexplicably, an in-over-my-head bookworm. Now, with Vonnegut in hand,…
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Seeing Home
I keep seeing license plates. Only certain ones, only ones from places I’ve lived before. Who knew that Brooklyn had so many cars visiting from Virginia? The other night I saw Rhode Island. And I never see anything else—not Connecticut or Jersey, or Pennsylvania or any other. I certainly never notice New York plates. The…