secularism

Laïcité is not equivalent to the American notion of “secularism.”

Nothing is as conducive to global radical mobilization as an exclusive theological summons.

Ben Sasse, winner of last week’s Republican Senate primary in Nebraska and likely the next senator from that state , is a Tea Party hero with an unusual credential: a PhD in history from Yale . Sasse…

With Egypt’s presidential election a few weeks away, former Field Marshal Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi seems all but unstoppable. In an interview with Egyptian television this week, the career military chief…

When all you have left is a drone, every problem looks like collateral damage.

So what should we do now? Nothing.

One senses that in Brooks’ reading of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age the principle of choice becomes its own form of transcendence.

When we read of Enlightenment efforts to rehabilitate the image of Islam alongside the fact that outgoing Rep. Michele Bachmann raised more than $1 million in 25 days from a Muslim-themed witch hunt, it’s easy to ask how such openness could curdle into such paranoia. But that would be too simple.

My grandfather, born to immigrants in 1878, was undoubtedly familiar with the all-but-forgotten figure of Robert Green Ingersoll, the “Great Agnostic,” who popularized Darwin for the millions, who championed the disgraced Thomas Paine, and who kept alive the important tradition of American free thought during the last quarter of the 19th century.

The debate over the “Defense of Religion Act” in North Carolina played out with the predictability of a sitcom. I offer this modest proposal, then, to remind both sides that if this is a war, then they have fought to a stalemate, and it is time for some new tactics, by which I mean: the history of religion in America demonstrates that the winner of the culture war will be the side that does the opposite of everything they are doing now.