The Economist has already shown its interest in following the fascinating recent scientific work about the origins and functions of human religiosity. This week’s article on the subject, “Praying for Health,” brings up challenging questions both for the study of religion and for the study of conflict. […]

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AlterNet has just posted a review I did of Lauri Lebo’s The Devil in Dover, an account of the 2005 evolution trial in Dover, Pennsylvania. It was a real treat to do the article, since I wrote my college thesis on the Dover trial while it was going on.

As another round of my usual spats with editors about titles, I’m not at all comfortable with the title AlterNet used, “Despite Overwhelming Evidence, Creationists Cling to Unreality.” In my thesis and in my review, I have tried to operate under the assumption that creationism feels like a reality, replete with evidence, to those who adhere to it. I only feel silly claiming that my reality, which they have yet to accede to, is the one with a capital R. All I claim in the article is that the scientific consensus is evolutionist, and that’s what we should teach in science classrooms. I have no intention of preaching metaphysics.

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This passage from Henry Miller’s late book, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, has long spoken to me. I first found it when I was eighteen, the summer of a month-long solo road trip across the United States and back, the climax of which was the discovery of Big Sur. Those were my big time “writer” days, when I still fought against my own nature and tried to write fiction, when I still thought “experience” was something that needed to be sought out. It comes in the context of an answer to a young writer who asked Miller’s advice in a letter:

To those who protest that they are not understood, not appreciated, not accepted—how many of us ever are?—all I can say is: “Clarify your position.” (p. 396)

What the passage has always told me is, be humble and be attentive with readers. It worked against the temptation in me to declare those who might misunderstand or contradict me as dumb, or worse. No—writing is communication, at least the kind I want to do. Patience, not stubbornness. (Though, at least in his early works, Henry Miller claimed never to revise.) […]

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It is always a wonderful sensation when one discovers something in an ancient text that feels fresh and alive and of the present. That was my experience today in reading book X of Plato’s Laws, his conservative, unfinished final work.

There is always this problem in doing historical work: what in our minds today was thinkable then, and what was not? For instance, there have been ongoing debates about whether the ancients were capable of atheism, or whether true atheism, as we understand it, is a recent invention of dour Victorians (or somesuch). What Plato says about naturalism here is as Victorian as can be.

But first, his moving sighs of woe at the youth who fail to accept the existence of the gods and thus venture into crime: […]

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I guess Cicero was the original flip-flopper. Since following him in a recent boat of watching the HBO/BBC TV series, Rome, I’ve been reading up on the guy who before I’ve mainly known from heresay—from the pens of Augustine, Montaigne, etc. It was disappointing to see that the show had no interest in Cicero’s (or anyone else’s) life in ideas, but its depiction of him as politician still caught my eye. Though it seems that there are the inevitable historical inaccuracies (such as his role in the Senate during the rule of Julius Caesar), Rome’s general gist of the man seems right: he was easily swayed and never convinced, and he didn’t stand up for his convictions—which is a thing people, and particularly politicians, are supposed to do. […]

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