Category: Posts
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Science of the Secular
Extra! Extra! In the Ideas section of today’s Boston Globe, I’ve got a new article. Read all about it! RELIGION CAN BE good for more than the soul, a growing number of studies seem to say. Over the past decade, academic research on religiosity has exploded, and with it has come a raft of publications…
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A Crook for Souls
Today I arrived in Wyoming to visit a dear friend. On the way, while in what she approvingly called “the Wyoming part of Colorado,” we passed the Benedictine Abbey of St. Walburga and decided to stop. On the road in we passed a magnificent little canyon and a pair of smiling alpacas. We were greeted…
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The Tweets of the Christ
I’ve got a new little piece at Religion Dispatches this morning about last Friday’s Twitter passion play hosted by Trinity Church, that ancient place located at the top of Wall Street. “If you look in the scripture,” explains Linda Hanick, Trinity’s V.P. of communications and marketing, “the last words of Jesus are almost written in…
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A Vegan Fast
Christos anesti. Over the years I’ve used the season of Lent as a sort of laboratory for experiments with truth. Perhaps that’s not the most properly penitential way to go about these 40 days of fasting, which should be more outwardly directed than inwardly, calling us out of ourselves to service, repentance, giving, and recognition…
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A Godly Test
Search magazine has just posted “Evolving Allah,” an article of mine on how people think about evolution in the Middle East. More in-depth than my earlier piece for Seed, it revolves around my interview with Harun Yahya (aka Adnan Oktar), the leader of a Turkish religious community known for his passion for creationism. When Oktar…
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Twitter Ontology
You know how people nowadays, when traveling especially, need to take a picture of everything just to be sure they’ve experienced it? Maybe they actually look at all those pictures. Or some of them. But isn’t the driving force much more that sneaking feeling at the moment of capture, a dizziness with experience that makes…
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How to Give Alms
Let’s start with some exegesis. Matthew 6:2-4. Go. So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not…
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Agency as a Vocation
New on the website of the Social Science Research Council, the interview I did last winter with David Kyuman Kim, a philosopher of religion who grapples with political agency, race, identity, and virtue. He’s also an incredibly gracious person who I’ve been very priviledged to work with at the SSRC. Central to both his work…
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The Multiverse Problem
I’ve got a new article out in Seed about how religious physicists, in particular, are thinking their way around the theological problems posed by multiverse theory. It’s good, mind-bending stuff. Scientists now recognize that if space were expanding at a slightly different speed, or if the strong nuclear force were just a little off, our…