Search Results

Anti-Islam fervor has overlooked important artistic contributions made by Muslim artists around the world. 

We can all rattle off a few Greek philosophers to win a trivia prize, but how many Golden Age philosophers are you familiar with? Here's a primer.

Science Guy Bill Nye is thrown a deep religious hypothetical: If there is a god that is truly good, intelligent and all-knowing, should we submit to its governance?

If Will Allen's documentary, Holy Hell, teaches us one thing, it's that there's no easy answer.

For nearly 50 years, a charred lump of Dead Sea Scrolls has been sitting in a lab, too brittle to unroll. Now it's been virtually unwrapped using 3D technology, and the contents are intriguingly – and significantly – petty.

In Queer Virtue, gay Episcopal priest Elizabeth M. Edman argues for a new take on this old religion.

Take all the Christians out of the United States and these are the biggest religions for each state: a Buddhist West, a Muslim crescent across the South and Midwest, and a Jewish Northeast.

One day, people will look back on humanity's religious past and laugh, says skeptic and science writer Michael Shermer.

An early 'viral' phenomenon, the Jedi faith is fading fast

Turkish cardinal directions? I didn't even know they had cardinals in Turkey!

Getting past your feelings is the first step to overcoming life’s problems. Wallowing in your emotions only holds you back.

Coming together after a tragedy is equally tribal as causing the tragedy in the first place.

Ninety years ago, America invented the Human Map, an art form now dominated by India.

Researchers advanced the fields of social science by working together and peer reviewing the evidence. Couldn't the same benefits be attained by treating religion in the same manner?

Ideas about religion can be so powerful that people can’t endorse them without giving up a part of their identity. It’s the same thing with diets.

Of the many concepts of Judaism artist Mark Rothko took to heart, the idea of tikkun olam, Hebrew for “repairing the world,” penetrated the deepest. In Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel, academic and a cultural historian Annie Cohen-Solal cuts to the heart of Rothko’s life and art and sheds new light on how both seemingly had to end at The Rothko Chapel (shown above), the Houston home of Rothko’s final works that he tragically didn’t live long enough to see himself. In this tightly focused new biography, Cohen-Solal shows us both how The Rothko Chapel culminates Rothko’s life-long mission to repair his world and how it continues to serve as a light of hope in our darkening world.

Everyone you pass on the street, each person you drive by every day, has a story as well. To claim their death is not worth noticing is to say that their life was not worth living. And that's too bad, because interdependence is something we all rely on every single day, knowingly or not. 

The massive damage humans have done to the natural world has provoked a backlash that could be just as dangerous, or more. There is a growing global rejection of technology and almost anything human-made in favor of whatever is more 'natural.' But a simplistic rejection of modern technologies eliminates many of our best options for solving the problems we've created.

Be honest. Nobody’s listening. How happy are you?

Blaming all members of any group for the extreme actions of a few ignores one of the underlying reasons for those actions, which is not the ideology or belifs of the group, but just the sense of empowerment that comes from belonging to something more powerful than those individuals feel.

Losang Samten escaped Tibet in 1959, when he was only five years old. After growing up in India, he came to the United States in 1988, and shared the teachings […]

Do religious institutions have an obligation to fight for social change? The Civil Rights movement sprung from the Baptist churches of the South. Without the congregations and the organizing power […]

All meaning is relational (otherwise it’s potentially useless and unhealthy). That’s true for both senses of meaning, and Nozick’s “Pleasure Machine” shows why workable individualism must be relational. 1. Individualism’s […]

“For over 200 years the world has been set on fire by a revolutionary message. The message is that every individual human being is divine. That all of us despite […]

According to a Pew Research study, if you count people who change from one type of Protestantism to another, “44% of American adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from […]

It’s explanation all the way down even though we won’t get to it because the explanations are infinite and we’re finite. That’s Spinoza’s guide.  

During his recent State of the Union Address, President Obama went for a cheap laugh line by questioning the value of an art history degree. Although he later half apologized, […]

David Gelernter: We’re seeing wisdom and moral seriousness come under attack and often from the same people who want to do the genetic engineering.  

Not only is religion just as bad as an infectious disease, Mr. Dawkins also says it is a form of child abuse.

Ideas from modern philosophy hold up better to scrutiny than does Buddhism.