September 11, 2020
Puritanism, Old and New: In Conversation with Marly Youmans on her New Novel
Marly Youmans, author of several books of poetry and fiction, released her new novel, Charis in the World of Wonders, just as the country was going into pandemic lockdown. I […]
February 23, 2016
Postscript to My Kanye West Posts
I’m a human being. . . I’m an artist, bro . . . —@kanyewest, February 13, 2016 Since I wrote about Kanye’s arrogance, based mainly in interviews and lyrics from […]
January 24, 2016
Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Death of God
The connection hinges on the meanings of the word mystery, but it’s worth considering. Creation, after all, is the scene of the greatest whodunit of all time—theoretical physicists and speculative metaphysicians […]
November 4, 2015
The Principle of Inversion
If you look from a distance at our media talking about traditional religions, you find that “Hinduism” is reduced to the caste system and Hindu nationalism, “Islam” to fundamentalist or […]
October 29, 2015
Hard and Brittle Religions
Why do some religions die out, while others persist in the face of brutal persecution? Religious diversity, while not completely analogous to biological diversity, has drastically diminished over the […]
July 12, 2014
Twin Towers of the Intellect
Both the theologian, advancing abstract definitions of Deity as the Ground of Being, transcendent of language and intellection, the impersonal prime mover, hardly so limited and vengeful and silly as […]
November 23, 2013
There are no Coincidences: Language and Apophenia
I have a peculiar mystical inkling about language, or rather about languages in the same language group or family, which is that there are no coincidences. Translingual synapses form, […]
October 19, 2013
Why I am Inherently Evil
The idea of karma—the moral effect of your actions, good or bad, following you across births—suggests that even a newborn has some inherent guilt. In this Eastern model of […]
May 11, 2013
Neureligion
There is very little (if any) variability in the brains of human beings regarding cortical localization. That is, the motor cortex responsible for, say, left arm movement, is reliably […]
August 27, 2012
The Two Gandhis
Takes on Mahatma Gandhi tend to focus either on the Mahatma or on the Gandhi: That is, they either consider him a holy man whose politics emerged from an inner “truth” […]
July 18, 2012
Constantly Protean: or, On Polytheism
The upside to getting published is getting read. The downside to getting published is getting misread. I recently found an interesting statement about my work (and myself) from a critic-blogger […]