Much like the Voynich Manuscript, which is so much of a media sensation that the media has now taken to publishing pieces about the sensationalism of the sensationalism, reporters evidently want you...

This is a terrific piece by a friend of mine, Darren Dochuk.  Darren is an historian of American Christianity, which can sound pretty norm-core and boring, but it isn't.  And Darren makes it...

Asma Uddin has recently published a nice book entitled When Islam is Not a Religion (link here, nice podcast about it here), a book discussing the many attacks from the right on Islam as a...

Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, has an interesting piece up about talking about religion in the classroom.  

Here's what I take to be the key passage stating the problem:

It may be the case that the most powerful force affecting the human future is demographics.  Will population continue to increase?  That seems unlikely, over the next century.  At some point all...

Inspiring, in its way. Wasn't it Mark Twain who said, "don't get it right, get it written"?

Is the "age of the expert as policymaker" coming to an end? 

In contrast, this from a...

This piece is getting some attention, which is fine.  Ray Monk is an excellent philosophical biographer, having done fine biographies of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.  He argues that had...

As a follow-up to my previous post about the crisis in institutions, I want to give a shout out to James Fallows, who with his wife Deborah, has been arguing for the past few years that while the...

In many ways we live in the most institutionally thick environment that humans have yet inhabited. Look inside your wallet: behold the many structures (drivers’ license, Social Security card, credit...

I'm teaching an "Engagement" class here at UVA entitled "The ethical state of the world" this semester, and one of my points is that "ethics" has now become an issue that has infiltrated parts of...