We have values that ought to trump market imperatives. That is one of the overriding themes of popular Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy, and there can hardly be anyone who would want to live in a world where every detail of common life is driven by market forces.
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Nothing excuses mob violence, of course, but it is still important to ask where it might come from, especially when it seems so disproportionate to the cause. What do you take from someone when you mock their religion? It's… Read full post »

It's not proper for me to reproduce it here, but a piece of mine contrasting Mitt Romney's social vision with the communitarian ethos of nineteenth-century Mormonism is on the Guardian website.

I am looking forward to the American publication of Pankaj Mishra's new book, From the Ruins of Empire, which has already attracted a good deal of attention in Britain and in Mishra's native India. Focused on the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, and looking at… Read full post »

Even though I’m deeply committed to my temple and to my practice, I’m not any more of a believer than I ever have been, or any less for that matter. Not long ago I heard two friends at the temple talking about periods of doubt, and my reaction was along the… Read full post »

I'll be posting soon about my newest book, A New Biology of Religion. Right now I'm finishing up a new manuscript and thought I would share a tiny piece of the draft:

There is no room within the structures of modernity for commonality on any subject but the exclusion of the common.…

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Long ago now, around 1968 or 1969, I paid a visit to Maurice Sendak. It was something of a spur of the moment decision, or rather a sudden decision followed by agonies of hesitation. Sendak was living in the West Village, and he was nothing like the famous man he was… Read full post »

Since getting back from India my practice has been getting deeper. I don't mean this as a boast, though I guess it sounds like one. I just find myself more interested in meditating and doing japam, they give me real pleasure, and it seems to me that I am doing it… Read full post »

I really do mean to write more here but things always seem to get in the way. I've been correcting proofs for the upcoming publication of A New Biology of Religion and beginning to write a book on our relationship with the Enlightenment, The Secret History of Reason, or, The Birth… Read full post »

A friend of mine, a gifted primatologist not yet working in her field, recently posted an image on Facebook purporting to show the difference between "science" and "faith" in a pair of flowcharts. I don't feel like squeezing the image into this page; you can see it here. But the "science"… Read full post »

I haven't been writing too much these days. One of the reasons is my involvement in Occupy Rochester here in upstate New York. It's been both time-consuming and exhilarating, as anyone who's been involved with the movement can tell you. Rochester's is not quite an occupation like the others, at least… Read full post »

How is it that corporations ended up as people? It's a pretty strange rule of law, but it's not completely absurd. In reality, the personhood of corporations is a legal fiction that got beyond itself. How that happened tells us as much about ourselves and our world… Read full post »

I've been busy for the past weeks getting a manuscript in shape for the publisher--so much so that all I can hope now is that it doesn't suck--but I hope to return to blogging soon. In the mean time. let me call your attention to "Some films in which Kitty Dawson… Read full post »

I suppose it was kind of strange that I could walk into a Hindu temple in my late fifties and feel at once that I belonged. Ours is an unusual temple, as temples go, and it's probably easier for a Westerner to feel at home there than it is in most… Read full post »

Richard Dawkins and other proponents of "selfish gene" theories are faced with a problem. If organisms are merely ways for genes to propagate themselves, and if they must compete with all of their conspecifics for advantages in reproduction, why is it that so many animals cooperate with and even sacr… Read full post »

Hypocrisy is the bread and butter of politics, and the politics of humanitarianism is no exception. Whatever one might think about the intervention (or is it simply a war?) in Libya, the rhetoric used to justify it is little more than disingenuous window dressing.  
 
All you really have to d… Read full post »

To promote their new Cloud Drive service Amazon are offering some really cheap classical MP3 collections, and last week I spent 99 cents for the stangely-titled and strangely-programmed "The 99 Most Essential Spring Classics." (It's still available here.) What attracted me was one of the eight hours… Read full post »

You can't swing a cat these days without hitting yet another book about the brain. The way we hear it, everything about the mind and the way we live and act and feel—all of this goes on in the brain, and now that we've got all these nifty brain scanning machines… Read full post »

 For a temple dedicated to the Goddess ours devotes a lot of time and attention to her consort and co-equal, the god Shiva. A few weeks ago we celebrated Maha Shivarathri, the most auspicious of all days to honor and propitiate this most fearsome and disconcerting of Hindu deities. The festival… Read full post »

This month yet another book is coming out "explaining" religion as a once-useful evolutionary adaptation. Jesse Bering's The Belief Instinct argues that religion is a side-effect of Theory of Mind.

What is Theory of Mind? To quote from an excerpt on Slate, it's a "scientific term" for our ability to… Read full post »

As John Cage tells the story, D.T. Suzuki--the man who did the most to bring Zen to the West--was once asked by an earnest listener if he didn't think there was too much suffering in the world. His reply was that there was exactly the right amount.

He was by no means… Read full post »

Why does just about every community known have some kind of religious life? If you happen to believe that there's a self-evidently divine power that shows itself to people or gets in contact with them through dreams or burning bushes there's nothing really to explain--certainly nothing about people t… Read full post »

The horrible news from Arizona suggests yet again that you can't keep people from taking your metaphors literally. Maybe Sarah Palin didn't mean the crosshairs on her "hitlist" as a suggestion that someone shoot Gabrielle Giffords. Maybe calling doctors murderers because they perform abortions doesn'… Read full post »

In response to the over-the-top and generally ignorant attacks of the new atheists it's common for writers to point to Hitler and Stalin, two non-religious people who did more harm than any two religious figures ever have. The lesson that gets drawn from this is, quite often, that the problem isn't… Read full post »

You have to watch out for people who talk about human nature, whether they're sociobiologists, old-school conservatives, or a radical like Chris Hedges, who talks about "the wisdom of original sin, as well as studies in cognitive behavior that illustrate that human nature is often irrational and fla… Read full post »