“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion . . . ” Thus, every reader of the Christian Scriptures is presented with this design and purpose framework to understand humanity. The Genesis account includes both the uniqueness—from other created things—and the commonality—in form and function—of all humans. Christian…

  Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling, for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted. Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now. … Every place had been displaced,…

Deerfield, IL — The Henry Center for Theological Understanding is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2021–2022 Henry Resident Fellowship. This year’s recipients are: Christina Bieber Lake, Gijsbert van den Brink, James Arcadi, Philip Woodward, and Jon Thompson. The Resident Fellowship program is the centerpiece of the Henry Center’s Creation Project, a multi-million dollar…

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…

In this essay I will focus on ways in which The Righteous Mind challenges Christians. Haidt’s empirical observations of a matrix of six moral “taste buds” coheres with Biblical ethical material—the Bible has a great deal to say about care, fairness (both equality and proportionality), loyalty, authority, sanctity and liberty. Haidt suggests that different groups…

It gives me great pleasure to respond to Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. This book is a sumptuous feast: substantive research garnished with personal stories and delivered with delightful prose. Building on his work in moral psychology, Haidt presents a social intuitionist model (SIM) of moral judgment. He argues that our moral decisions stem primarily…

After another brutally contentious presidential election, once again, friends, family, and neighbors struggle to understand how it is possible that their loved one could be so benighted as to vote for, and perhaps even offer active support, for one candidate or the other. Most of us have seen more than an article or two offering…

I am delighted to be a part of this symposium on a book that raises both timeless and timely matters. Prof. Haidt’s desire, based on his citing of Baruch Spinoza, is to “understand” human actions. For this aim, he can only be praised. I join him in this undertaking, and it is in this spirit…

I was first introduced to Jonathan Haidt in March of 2012 after his appearance on Moyers & Company to discuss his book, The Righteous Mind. After watching the interview, I canceled my lecture the next day on the virtues of democracy and, instead, showed the entire interview in my Christianity and Society course. I was…

As I read the preface of Jonathan Haidt’s book, and the concern in the US about “political relations and the collapse of cooperation across party lines” (p. xvii), my immediate thought was: I wonder if he’s going to acknowledge that people live in different universes? With different views of what a human is, what meaning…

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…

It is safe to say that Plundering Eden is an exercise of the imagination. I, of course, do not practice what I preach to a degree I would desire. I am honored and humbled to have this conversation around my book by such excellent scholars. Response to Brian Brock I am grateful for Brian Brock’s…