Making Sense of Religion

• Boredom, Dionysos, and the Ethic of Authenticity

  For people like Trump there is no good or bad; there is only boring and entertaining, and so anything is permitted so long as it is entertaining. The only sin is to be a bore, and it is better to be a boor than a bore.  This is a truth someone like Matt Gaetz well

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• Anne Applebaum on the Psychology of Collaboration

  Why do people collaborate with people they have before seen as their enemy? What explains a Lindsay Graham or a Ted Cruz or a Nikky Haley? Or perhaps the more interesting question is what explains the motives of those who resist–the Liz Cheneys or Adam Kinzigers? Well, there are so many good reasons to do

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• How Does this End Well?

  The big question for me going forward is to what degree the craziness of the hard right in this country will retain the level of legitimacy it now enjoys? A related question is what has to happen for its grip on so many Americans to loosen? The answer to the second question is foundational for

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• Have you know sense, sir?

  This is a text I received from a prominent conservative Christian minutes after President Biden’s Inaugural Address: “I broke down sobbing. It’s been a long five-and-a-half years.” Shortly after that, Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., emailed me a note that said, “I never thought I would be moved to

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• The Difference between Faith and Idolatry

  This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis. On March 15, Guillermo Maldonado, who calls himself an “apostle” and hosted Mr. Trump earlier this year at a campaign event at his Miami megachurch, urged his congregants to show up for worship services in person.

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• A Reflection on the Meaning of the Incarnation

  My own conviction is that life was not ‘created’ — I have always taken the view of Bergson and Shaw, that life was, so to speak, already there, but not in our universe of matter. It has spent fifteen billion years or so somehow ‘inserting’ itself into matter. Shaw expressed it by saying that the universe

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• The Religion of Humanity and the Death of God

  Terry Eagleton's book, Culture and the Death of God runs parallel to the parts of Taylor's book that trace out the West's march toward secularism and the possibility for atheistic humanism. Eagleton's book, however, starts at the Enlightenment and focuses more on the history of ideas than in changes to the social imaginary. It's a dynamic process, of course,

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• Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’, Part 4

  Part 4: The Anthropocentric Turn Let's sum up what we've presented in Parts 1 – 3. Part 1 focused on the process of disembedding from the premodern enchanted social and cosmic imaginary to one that is thoroughly disembedded and disenchanted. This disembedding process has produced the buffered selves that we have become and the radically secular society

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• Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’, Part 3

  Part 3: The Impersonal Order In Part 1, I discussed briefly Taylor's ideas about a social imaginary. I don't think the idea is hard to understand, but understanding its implications reinforces the idea I have written a lot about on this blog, which is the way we moderns imagine 'reality' is very provisional: humans did not always

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• Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’, Part 2

  Part 2. Reform: The Rage for Order Many societies have moments of 'reform', but Taylor wants to make the case that the rage for Reform in the Latin West was unique and was central to the emergence there of the secular society Westerners introduced to the world. As described in Part I, before the reform bug bit elites

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