July 30, 2017
Dear Future People
how angels would walk the ocean if they wanted to walk. They don’t. They hover. —”Water at Night,” Marianne Boruch —or did you get past us, just far […]
January 31, 2016
Charleston Heavy
I’ve loved Charleston for awhile now. The first time I saw the city’s name was on a baseball cap my dad brought back from Air Force Reserve training, one of […]
August 11, 2014
Liberal Arts, Literature, and the Dope New Pope
Recently when I was walking across the campus where I teach with a student who is an atheist, she said, “The new pope is pretty dope.” (That’s a good thing, […]
April 16, 2014
Magical Mystery Tour: Science as the New Authority
In Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” passage from The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor’s plan to “correct” the work of God (in a sense, to establish the Church) was based on […]
December 12, 2013
The Future of an Identity
Even the bitterest hater of religion would concede it is exceedingly unlikely to vanish–not least because antireligious ideologues end up behaving like a religious community, with group-forming behavior (and group […]
August 25, 2013
The Nature of Authority
A book describing the afterlife has been on the bestseller lists for some time, a first-person account by a neurosurgeon. It’s one of those books I’ve read reviews of, but […]
August 18, 2013
Video Games and Religion
A worldwide majority of people have claimed, for centuries, that they believe in, and want to go to, heaven. Whether heaven exists has always been a matter of debate, but […]
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 […]
February 10, 2013
“Western” and “Modern”
It is interesting to note that among Indian Hindus, the words “Western” and “modern” are well-nigh interchangeable in usage. That is, a “modern” way of dressing, loving and marrying, […]
December 28, 2012
The Importance of Telling a Good Story
You would think that with scientific knowledge expanding ever so exponentially, and literalist interpretations of traditional scriptures undermined east and west by it, you would see a great popular surge […]
August 12, 2012
What is Truth?
Let us conceive of the mind as a weave of two fibers, as we consider muscle a weave of fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscles. The relative composition of a muscle is genetically […]
August 8, 2012
Secret Credos of the Godless
Notice how scientists are always talking about laws. Laws with a capital L, no less. Einstein’s Laws, Poiseuille’s Law, Hooke’s Law, Fourier’s Law, etc., etc. This endless law-giving reveals something […]