Let me begin by thanking each of the contributors for their thoughtful entries in this conversation; I thank Professor Haidt as well for a book well worth interacting with. His other commitments precluded him from responding to these contributions, so I will wrap things up, trying both to exercise sympathy with Haidt’s project and to…

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist, with a focus on moral reasoning and behavior. Coming from a basically secular Jewish and politically centrist background, Haidt set out to answer the question in the sub-title (“Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion”), and in so doing sheds genuine light on the present polarization of…

The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that The Princess Bride (1987) is a cinematic masterpiece, and a virtually limitless source of helpful quotations, from scene after scene. About two-thirds through the film, Inigo and Fezzik take the (mostly) dead Man in Black to Miracle Max asking for, well, a miracle: the resuscitation…

In this forum we are considering the question, “Were humans mortal before the fall?” I am going to argue that the answer to the question is of no theological consequence. My reasons have to do with, first, the reticence of the biblical material on the subject; second, with the kind of description we have in…

A study in genomic sciences that was on most counts not newsworthy has made big headlines in recent days, both in the media’s initial declarations and in the ensuing reaction. The cynic in me suspects that the whole thing was predictable from the very get-go. The study, published in The American Journal of Human Genetics,…

The philosopher Alvin Plantinga argued in his book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, religion, and naturalism (Oxford University Press, 2011), the central thesis: “There is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism.” Now, Plantinga wrote about “theistic religion,” but his main…

The English language borrowed the word genre from French, which was in turn derived from Latin genus. We use these words to classify things, especially art forms: “The Stray Cats play music mostly in the rockabilly genre.” I know what to listen for when I find the music videos, and I also know that my…