philosophy

If Lord of the Rings was the epic for the Cold War era, then Game of Thrones is the epic for our time, with the disappearance of the clear oppositions that once enabled easy discrimination between friend and enemy.

Amid the clamor to figure out who Pope Francis might be, observers never failed to mention that he is the first Jesuit pope. But what does that really tell us and, more importantly, as his decisions begin to come down the pipeline, what is most important to know about his Jesuit worldview?

This is not just a dancing cat blog.

Philosopher Simon Critchley on evangelical atheists, the ‘supreme fiction’ in politics or love, and why the debate over whether you believe in a god is massively irrelevant.

John Hick, a celebrated theologian and philosopher who died earlier this year, was drawn to issues that transcend any particular tradition—the question of evil, the meaning of suffering, life after death, and religious diversity.

I lie a lot on airplanes. Not in any way that should upset the TSA or anything like that—just to the question “What do you do?” I don’t like admitting to strangers what it is I do. I’m a Ph.D. student…

Jeffrey Stout’s Blessed Are the Organized is arguably even more relevant now than when it was published last year. Even then, the United States economy had collapsed in on itself. Barack Obama’s role had fully shifted from community organizer to Beltway compromiser, and the grassroots was being overgrown by Tea Party “astroturf.” But now—as politicians wrestle our economy even lower to the ground at the behest of organized elites, and the voice of the majority seems to grow ever fainter in their ears—the kind of real grassroots organizing Stout writes about seems all the more to be what we need.

Both the good and bad in our species come from our primate background, says primatologist Frans de Waal, author of The Age of Empathy.

When he’s not writing bestselling books, Vincent Bugliosi is a legendary prosecuting attorney. As such, he is certainly well acquainted with the legal policy of presumption of innocence. His newest book, Divinity of Doubt, a treatise on agnosticism, would have been much better if Bugliosi had taken this principle into account in the context of his arguments for, and against, God.

The University of Notre Dame had cause for its anxiety leading up to last week’s big debate between the New Atheist polemicist Sam Harris and the evangelical philosopher William Lane Craig. It’s said that all publicity is good publicity, but one needn’t strain too hard to find an exception—least of all in the history of God debates.