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…

Unlike the magisterial reformers, their radical counterparts were more suspicious of the role of secular government, and their approaches to worldly authority appear on a spectrum from theocracy to entire separation. Many Anabaptists ultimately rejected politics and argued that church and state must be entirely distinct. One who disallowed any place for Christians in secular…

The reformer of Geneva, John Calvin (1509-1564) affirmed a greater distinction between the roles of the church and the state in his formulation of the two kingdoms than many of his contemporaries, which perhaps reflects the contentious relationship he often had with the Genevan civil authorities. Nevertheless, he still sees these civil and spiritual governments…

In formulating their doctrine of two kingdoms for the governance of the world, the magisterial reformers envisioned a close, reciprocal relationship between these two institutions. In this excerpt from Urbanus Rhegius (1489-1541) in response to Anabaptism, the Lutheran theologian argues that in their role of administering the temporal world, leaders are nevertheless to seek the…

Reading Journal Home << Previous Entry Next entry >> In this installment of the Inferno Reading Journal, I muse on how Dante subverts our politics, critiques our stewardship of our resources, calls out heresy as a sin of reason, and employs the Medusa as an image of our sin. To start at the beginning of Sapientia‘s Dante…