Tag: science
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Hacking the World
My profile of anthropologist Gabriella Coleman in The Chronicle of Higher Education opens with a scene from the New York City memorial service for Aaron Swartz in January: The forces that seem to have hastened Swartz’s death were very much haunting the room. In the audience was a mischievous, greasy-haired hacker known as “weev,” who…
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Does Science Need Religion?
When one is out to study religion, or to cover the religion beat, it can be awfully tempting to see religion everywhere you look as the all-satisfying explanation for everything. It’s the whole if-you-have-a-hammer-everything-looks-like-a-nail effect, right? Today at Religion Dispatches I’ve got a review of the new book by Steve Fuller, a rather audacious and…
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Martyr City
If you don’t know the name Hypatia, you should. In the grand mythology of the Enlightenment (to which, on optimistic days, I subscribe), her murder at the hands of a Christian mob marks more or less the end of Greek philosophy and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Now, for those of you who don’t…
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The Politics of Big Questions: The John Templeton Foundation
As I’ve worked on questions of religion and reason, both in the academy and as a journalist, the John Templeton Foundation has been around every turn. As I called, corresponded, and visited with many of the leading thinkers in the science-and-religion discussion, caution was the prevailing tone—some even joked that I should get them on…
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The Proof Industry
Today at The Guardian, a bit of a glimpse into my ongoing obsessions about proofs for the existence of God. Just last night, sifting through a novella I wrote as a freshman in college, I discovered a whole forgotten chapter about the proofs—for some reason, they have been following me so doggedly all these years.…