The writer went to Walden to reorient his world, so that the woods, rather than the town, centered his spiritual map.
Tag: Religion
What Will Be Impossible?
Why excavate these Reformation characters—the preacher and the werewolf—now? What do they have to teach us?
Public Thinker: Meghan O’Gieblyn on God, Machines, and Intelligence
“We can’t always explain how algorithms reach their decisions. The reasoning of algorithms, like the will of God, is unfathomable.”
Leaving Orthodoxy, Again
Losing faith in Orthodox Judaism is an old story. But today it’s often the “heretics” who rely on faith, and the “faithful” who draw on science.
What Happens When a Metaphor Becomes Real?
The humanities can reveal the truth of the world’s crises, everything from contagions like the pandemic to apocalypses like right-wing violence.
Philanthropy and the “Jewish Continuity Crisis”
Today, Jewish philanthropy—like all philanthropy—is big business, thanks to US philanthropy’s torturous entanglement with US capitalism.
Leïla Slimani’s Taboos
Franco-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani reveals the dirty underside of bourgeois domesticity. Is her taboo breaking worthy of praise?
“Soulful, Perhaps Even Magical” Science
Yaa Gyasi’s new novel meditates on the problems we try to solve with science, with faith, and with love.
Watching the End Times from the Good Place
Television responded to our cultural—and planetary—existential crisis with The Good Place.
Who Gets to Be a Jewish Writer?
“The term ‘Jewish writer,’” argues Cynthia Ozick, “ought to be an oxymoron.” Yet 82 years earlier, in 1924, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva proclaimed that “in ...
Whose Life?
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by the philosopher Martin Hägglund, who teaches at Yale, is a book anyone committed to public-facing scholarship ought to take note of. This is all the ...
Another Mormon Education
The first sentence Tara Westover writes in her engrossing memoir Educated is a disclaimer: “This story is not about Mormonism.” This is true in the same ...
Marriage and Other Shams
In the early 1980s, an Indian guru homesteaded a tract of ranchland in rural Oregon, building a utopia equipped to withstand both HIV and American hypocrisy. Armed with free love and even freer ...
“Am I Not One of the ‘Disappeared’?”
Zahia Rahmani’s « Musulman » roman hinges on a question that has gathered force in recent years: a witness is speaking, but will she ever be heard?
A Ouija for the Apocalypse
It is no easy feat to establish a cult and herald the apocalypse. I learned this firsthand while playing the card-based videogame Cultist Simulator, set in ...
Islamic Alternatives to Global Finance
Across the Muslim world today ambitious experiments are underway to create an Islamic alternative to conventional finance. These initiatives are inspired by the ...
The Gay Conversion Therapy Memoir
“To continually go before God and ask for forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and ...
“Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Wall”
When US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he would be stepping down after 31 years on the nation’s highest court, public reaction was both swift ...
“The Girl I Loved Was in a Cult”
North Korean refugees, among other refugees, have been sharing their stories of high-stakes escapes. American university students, among other women, have ...
Virtual Roundtable on “The Mana of Mass Society”
Many of anthropology’s terms of art are taken from afar. Especially in the half century after 1870 ...