“The time is coming fast when the whole world will gather here.” Sathya Sai Baba
The ways in which the concept of “religion” operates in that culture as motive and as effect, how it mutates, what it affords and obstructs, what memories it shelters or excludes, are not eternally fixed.
Cosmopolitanism commits you to a global conversation, or a set of global conversations, about the things that matter.
Thinking more deeply about how we can inhabit the public sphere with others.
Western conceptions of political secularism do not appear to have travelled well to other societies.
For the people to be sovereign, they need to form an entity and have a personality.
The root notion of the secular is a contrast not to religion but to eternity.
When people’s personal friendship networks become more religiously diverse, that seems to make them more accepting of other faiths, but it also turns out that if you add friends within a congregation, more church friends, you actually become more civically engaged.
What is a Catholic philosopher?
The hope of reform and renewal, the conviction that things could get better, was crucial to the founding of this nation.
MLK’s American Dream always appealed to the value of equality.
We can be sure that, religiosity being constitutional in human and social terms, religion has survived.
Religion is more than the many ways in which it can be viewed.
Our moral educations should happen at dinner tables, in classrooms, on football fields, in synagogues and churches.
A eulogy for book culture, a polemic against the online-content economy that has replaced it, and an international, interreligious romp.
Uncomfortable though it might be to admit, Heidegger’s thinking is part of the Jewish textual tradition.
Rogan’s book is a welcome step toward uncovering and building up a tradition of alternative economics, one in which economics is not a value-free discipline, but, rather, is shaped by social customs, expectations, and values.
Our political moment demands to see who we are—a beautiful and terrifying ordeal.
What emerges in the essays in this issue is actually not one secularism, but rather a range of secularisms—French, American, Indian, and other—that can be compared, evaluated, and improved upon.
While structures of power may change quickly, the building of a new social order is a longer and more precarious process.
Food is a strong proof of our animality; it is equally strong evidence of how we transcend it.
How does one deal with the “trees and forests” complexity of a career like David Tracy’s?
Baring introduces a community of thinkers whose contributions have been obscured.
A grotesque and caricatured version of Simone Weil undermines an otherwise good book.
Writing a book about Thomas Jefferson means entering a very crowded field.
Like the “radical orthodoxy” associated with John Milbank, Stanley Hauerwas, and an array of other British and American theologians, Hart’s project of rejuvenation has been no narrowly theological or academic exercise.
“White Christian nationalism” remains a grievance-driven mode of whiteness.
On the face of it, Simone Weil is a remarkably poor candidate for domestication.
Over the last half century, there has been a transition from regular to irregular forms of cultural and political combat.
Black Americans still embrace the exodus story as the defining trope of their collective experience.
Augustine is crucial to determining the continuity and dissimilarity between the Romans and ourselves.
We see the peculiar features of neoauthoritarianism as quite real modern-day reincarnations of the ancient tradition of divine kingship.
The captivity narrative is the most American of genres, not just in fostering fear, paranoia, and violence but in contributing to the creation myth of a new variety of person: the American.
As much as we may wish otherwise, history gives us few reasons to believe that its moral arc bends toward justice.
Putin continues to play the Third Rome card that has brought him this far.
It is nearly impossible to be a white, American Christian without being an evangelical.
This project is and always has been worthwhile, even if groups of detractors talk themselves out of it from time to time.
Does anyone still need advice on how not to think like a liberal?
The only way out of this prison of self-deception and self-justification is to love and seek the truth.
Contending with a radical distrust of the created world.
I’ve been cursed to envision peace without ever experiencing it myself.
Costică Brădățan’s argument in praise of failure rests on its ability to make us humble.
Tradition is stalked by the uncertain possibility of either faithfulness or infidelity, handing down or handing over.
Pentecostal Christianity remains oddly ignored and misunderstood.
Tillich suggested another word—and a curious one—to help interpret sin: estrangement.
We are witnessing the ultimate emergence of tensions latent in the very foundations of the modern.
Where do the Hasidim fit in the American picture of religious liberty?
True adulthood in a true liberalism depends on properly using God’s gift of liberty of the will.
Friendship is the reason for our lives. Nothing is more important.
The rise of unbelief is correlated to the lived experience of urban and industrial settings.
It is a tall order to see—and to enable others to see—with a child’s perception and the wisdom of a pilgrim.
The Claphamites unquestionably launched a revolution in manners that shaped what we have come to know as Victorian morality.
To say that writing novels trained a mind for eternity was a bold professional claim.
All “authentic” travel becomes a kind of secular pilgrimage.
Our contemporary culture is a culture of nihilism without nihilists.
Measurable impact has crept into everyday understandings of charity.
Christians will soon be a minority here, which was for most of this nation’s history unthinkable.
The necessity of a genuine exchange (not just fatuous “dialogue”) between Christians and Buddhists is as important as ever.
Were the signs and wonders of the early modern mystics divine or diabolical?
We are told that we are a Calvinist culture, which means very little, and none of that good.
Our inability to switch off our commonsense intuitions will lead us to adopt some odd, half-formed ideologies.
The Jewish suspicion of confession is a kind of epistemological modesty, an unwillingness to examine other minds too closely.
Edith Stein emphasized that “anyone who has tried to translate a foreign language knows how much he cannot translate…and anyone who has thought about what language as such is, and what languages are, knows it cannot be otherwise.”
Signs and wonders have occurred in human history, and they continue to do so.
Meaningful social change requires the kind of social reconciliation that can only emerge through aggregated instances of both forgiveness and repentance.
For the editors of The Economist, euthanasia is "an idea whose time has come."
Francis’s integral ecology challenges some tendencies on both the right and the left.
Bernie Sanders at Liberty University is more than a momentary truce in the culture war.
With our colleagues, and with our students, we have the space not only to express disagreement in more than tweets and sound bites, but also to probe the reasons underlying our disagreement.
The question for Silence is not whether another world exists but how such a recognition should affect our lives here.
Confident pluralism at its best requires people and institutions that know themselves well enough to articulate the reasons for their differences.
In France, wearing a COVID-19 mask will mean a real revolution in norms governing behavior in its public space.
The secrets of Jerusalem are also lodged in Jacksonville, Joplin, and Joliet
Perhaps the older Auden merely wants to have the humility to accept the terms on which agape offers itself.
Even defenders of the idea today such as Bruno Latour admit that Gaia in the original Greek context is “a figure of violence."
Well, then, why—on Kierkegaard’s view—would anyone choose a life of faith?
Mainline Protestant ministries to migrants had unintentionally opened the door to their diminished cultural dominance
We have here two very different approaches to spiritual authenticity.
The circumstances that led to veneration of the tsar and his family cannot be so easily reduced to a reactionary craving for Christian theocracy.
The genealogical approach has found surprising success in an unlikely genre.
It seems that neo-paganism is attractive in part because it offers an identity to those who have rejected postmodern, deracinated versions of Christianity.
What makes this so difficult is that time has a way of eroding the power of words.
Benedict shared with skeptics, postmodernists, and existentialists the suspicion of the modern trust in the benevolence of the human will.
What to become? Dissident or emigrant? Move abroad?
The primary social forces disrupting American society today are modern versions of two false religions.
No one works in Rajneeshpuram. They “worship.” Worship includes grading roads, plowing fields, pursuing the many lawsuits brought by Bhagwan in Oregon.
Every graduate student in the humanities should be required to take a course in the English Bible.
There is nothing winsome about this Jesus, but winsomeness is not, Milton believes, what we need from him.
Dostoevsky is too Christian for a secular age and too secular for Christendom.
Understanding the extent of the threat posed by Bibi requires a broad historical perspective.
What are the implications for any society that emphasizes monuments to power and domination over imagination and the arts?
You read a poem and it awakens you to something that you already knew.
As he roamed the edges of Lake Como, Romano Guardini foresaw the birth of a new world.
We need more than genealogies to know who we are, and who we ought to become.
The most creative, innovative, and profound MacIntyre was the one who thought about moral rationality.
Singing is not to be understood as an aesthetic sweetener.