I have been interested for more than a decade, in a somewhat casual and amateurish way, in the thinking of Ibn Khaldun, the 14th century Islamic (more specifically, Maghrebian) jurist, politician...

One of my favorite lines in literature is from Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

...

Again, on vacation, so no extended thoughts, just seedlings of different things:

Historians drawing interesting, though only moderately so, connections between our age and different...

One way to think about the modern world--say, the world that was "sketched out" in the 19th century and then "filled in" in the 20th--was that it saw, fundamentally, the rise of the middle class. ...

It's weird to see stories like these, suggesting that al-Qaeda may be having a hard time staying afloat.  This piece by the Brookings Institution's Daniel Byman is a nice backgrounder to the...

For a long time, evangelical numbers in Latin America have been growing.  As this article points out, "the share of the population in Bolivia who are Protestant has increased from 7.6% in 1985 to an...

Another basket:

A cool piece on Nalanda University, "the world's first residential university."

A fun piece on "the dangers of a lingua franca in philosophy."  The problem is not only...

Because I'm on vacation this week and next, I'll be posting more of these "baskets of links" than I normally would.  I hope you find something interesting in each of them.

This is...

I am not a conservative theorist.  But in many ways, I could be.  I am a straight middle-aged white man married for almost twenty years with children, who is traditionally religious, reflexively...

One of the things that "religious studies" as an academic discipline does, for me anyway, is make me think about the ways that human beliefs, patterns of action, pictures of the world, practices...