Monthly Archives: May 2007

Religion and the public sphere

Chris Dillow reminds us that secularists seek not to extirpate religious belief but to keep it out of the public sphere (a distinction that’s mostly lost on Richard Dawkins, incidentally). At least, that’s the moral I draw from his attempt to answer a “tricky question” raised by Johann Hari about the Christian roots of Gordon [...]

Tourist Season

In the title story of Enid Shomer’s Tourist Season, the septuagenarian Frieda lives in apparently comfortable retirement in a Florida condominium with her husband, Milt. The Floridian setting and the narrowly domestic scope are typical of many of Shomer’s stories, in which female protagonists try to peer beyond the horizons of relationships that are either [...]

Moral Minds

According to Marc Hauser, “morality is grounded in our biology”. We’ve heard this sort of thing before, of course—from evolutionary biologists, for instance, who claim that natural selection favours altruistic behaviour, since acting benevolently towards other people is a way of securing our genetic posterity. Some proponents of the evolutionary explanation go further, and infer [...]