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…

Plundering Eden is not a boring book, either in its rhetoric or its substance. Wagenfuhr addresses his audience with forthright statements and forceful assertions, which serve to undergird his powerful ethical challenge. The problem the book addresses is both empirical and ideological. Problems, Empirical and Ideological Wagenfuhr marshals important evidence to show that human interaction…

Plundering Eden is disturbing in all the right ways. True to the book’s subtitle, Wagenfuhr is “subversive” in his critique of human progress and institutions. Looking to technological and political policies to solve our ecological destruction of life and habitats on Earth is delusional, because our technology and policies are themselves problematic, extensions of our…

In the 2020 documentary My Octopus Teacher, filmmaker Craig Foster offers us a vivid account of a human undergoing a process of recovering from the depredations of overly managed, hyper productive modernity under the tutelage of a tiny octopus. Foster lives on the ocean, in the western cape of South Africa. After burning out in…

G. P. Wagenfuhr serves as Theology Coordinator for ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. Plundering Eden (2020) is a follow-up to his earlier book, Plundering Egypt: A Subversive Christian Ethic of Economy (2016). The subtitles for both books describe them as “subversive.” Even a casual reading of Plundering Eden reveals this description to be…