Post Secularism

• The Return of the Bobos

  A few thoughts on David Brook's Atlantic piece, "How the Bobos Broke America". It's interesting but not particularly helpful. For the most part, I think it accurately correlates with my own perception about how class works in the U.S., but it doesn't get to the underlying problem that I have been writing about in the

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• What the Right & Left Get Right but Why Both Are Mostly Wrong

  [I]n all these respects, it seems to me that the Renaissance started out with a huge expansion of the right hemisphere’s way of being in the world, into which, initially, the work of the left hemisphere is integrated. And it is this that accounts for the astonishing fertility and richness, as well as the remarkable

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• Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Bugs Me

  I am an absolute sceptic and materialist, and regard the universe as a wholly purposeless and essentially temporary incident in the ceaseless and boundless rearrangements of electrons, atoms, and molecules which constitute the blind but regular mechanical patterns of cosmic activity. Nothing really matters, and the only thing for a person to do is to

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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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• The Coming Discontinuity: A Theological Reflection through the Sensibility of a Progressive Catholic

  I realize that in this moment the idea of recovering a Catholic sensibility is so much spitting in the wind, but nevertheless, in the long run something like it is called for because without a restoration of a sense of the sacramental, the machines win. I'll come back to defend this assertion toward the end. 

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• Fear of the Future

  The right and the left share a sense of creeping doom, though for different reasons. For people on the right, it’s sparked by horror at changing demographics and gender roles. For those on the left, a primary source of foreboding is climate change, which makes speculation about what the world will look like decades hence

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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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• Iain McGilchrist, Hegel, and the Coincidentia Oppositorum

  Ultimately the principle of division (that of the left hemisphere) and the principle of union (that of the right hemisphere) need to be unified: in Hegel’s terms, the thesis and antithesis must be enabled to achieve a synthesis on a higher level. Split-brain patients can tell us a little about this level from their experiences

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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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