science

DiamondRing2009-RickFienberg

Transit of Shadow: On Eclipses

Totally predictable, yet totally magical.

DiamondRing2009-RickFienberg

KtB Wants You…To Write About the Eclipse

The total solar eclipse passing over the continental U.S. this August 21st is the first to do so in 99 years, but American eclipse stories go back much farther than…

LivingWithAWildGod

“It’s The World That’s Strange”

Barbara Ehrenreich talks to Jeff Sharlet about her new book, mysticism, secrecy, and science.

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Big Bang Fingerprints

We all leave our traces. Even campers who fastidiously carry their garbage out of the woods leave footprints behind. Flora and fauna from millions of years ago are found fossilized…

Killing the Buddha

Ham on Nye: Beyond the Debate

Having been party to an extremely brief and insignificant debate with Ken Ham in these pages over the account of his Creation Museum in my 2011 book Paradise Lust: Searching…

IMG_1072

Gym Class Zen

An ode to pain.

Killing the Buddha

Baseball Literalism

There is a long and often ridiculous history of comparing baseball to a religion. Rule-bound, slow to change, cyclic, and timeless; an assembly of people presided over by men in funny…

TheGiantVermin, via Flickr

Love is an Animal Thing

Barbara King’s new book How Animals Grieve raises questions about grief, and its emotional corollary, love, for humans too.

Definitely not African.

Adam and Eve or Bust

You’ve probably heard about Professor John R. Schneider, who lost his job at Calvin College, a Christian school, for claiming that Adam and Eve could not have been real people.…

Still from The Tree of Life

Visualizing the Cosmos

Terrence Malick and an imaginary history of the universe.

Train of Thought

Stephen Hawking Decrees God Away

This afternoon on the New York subway I came across this little gem, this “train of thought” meant to inspire who-knows-what among riders in the course of their usual hum-drum…

Killing the Buddha

A Pier into the Brain

Vladimir Lipovetsky M.D. from Los Angeles writes in about Robert Jensen’s “The Struggle for the (Possible) Soul of David Eagleman“: The trouble with many articles that explore applications and limitations…

Killing the Buddha

Does Science Need Religion?

When one is out to study religion, or to cover the religion beat, it can be awfully tempting to see religion everywhere you look as the all-satisfying explanation for everything.…

"Brain (Left)" and "Brain (Right)," © Don Stewart.

The Struggle for the (Possible) Soul of David Eagleman

A neuroscientist imagines life beyond the brain.

Illustration by the author.

Farewell, Little Piece of Me!

Skin-punch biopsies in remembrance of Christ.

hypatia_302

Martyr City

If you don’t know the name Hypatia, you should. In the grand mythology of the Enlightenment (to which, on optimistic days, I subscribe), her murder at the hands of a…

TheNation

The Politics of Big Questions

As I’ve worked on questions of religion and reason, both in the academy and as a journalist, the John Templeton Foundation has been around every turn. As I called, corresponded,…

"Religion-And-Science" by a-small-lab, via Flickr

Speaking of Science

Krista Tippett and her interlocutors take on the “Big Questions.”