It’s almost always a category mistake to generalize about “religion.” This is such an amorphous category that it is like attempting to generalize about all people who have ever labored. Our stance should indeed be agnostic before we dig into cases.

Hardwired into religious traditions, as part of longstanding sensibilities, are teachings about justice, care for the weak, and attention to the common good: teachings that command nontrivial respect in the public sphere.... Common sense plus the moral legacies of our religious traditions add up to a combined weight that is not trivial. We may not be able to fight a riptide, but if we can fund a war, then surely we can fund a school.

What follows is a case study in media polling that we should not trust, but rather treat as our enemy. It makes a few points about health...

Like many of my fellow citizen/consumers groomed by algorithms that feed us our personal news, I like it when algorithms feed me stories...

(Part of a thread to share poems or poetry-adjacent writing, as discussed here .) We cannot say how this cascading wreck of complacent...

What should this blog say about the ongoing slaughter in Gaza? So much is already being written that adding my voice may be redundant,...