#religious-conformity

#religious-conformity

How reductive is Buddhist reductionism in the Nikāya Suttas? Soo Lam Wong examines the implications of reductionism within Buddhist texts and its philosophical significance.

Burnout is not a temporary affliction; it's the millennial condition. It's like we just churn out tired, exhausted souls like a widget factory. I don't know if you feel this at all yet in your body or in your bones. If you don't, it's because you're still young and you haven't been in the city very long. But you will. Trust me, you will.

"We're sensing, based on the data, a change in the religious environment in this country," said Gallup senior scientist Frank Newport, an author of the report.

On Holy Saturday, as Palestinian Christians tried to reach the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Israeli security forces started attacking and arresting them, demonstrating a clear violation of religious freedoms.

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson described Iran's majority faith tradition, Shiite Islam, as a 'misguided religion' while discussing the ongoing U.S. strikes against Iran on March 4, 2026.

In 2025, the nonreligious share of the American population declined again, with the atheist-agnostic share back down to levels seen in 2014, suggesting a potential revival.

Behind the closed doors of a therapy practice, science and spiritual traditions are not adversaries. In fact, knowing how to ensure that your belief system is compatible with counseling can transform your experience and strengthen your bond.

Witnessing the presence of God at a bus stop in 2011, I felt overwhelmed by something indescribably majestic, which bared my soul to a profound realization.

We are living through one of the most disorienting periods in recorded history. The AI race is accelerating toward ever faster, ever more sophisticated automation and optimization. Agentic AI systems are moving from research labs into workplaces, healthcare, and governance. Geopolitical tensions are restructuring alliances faster than institutions can adapt. And planetary systems are signaling, with increasing urgency, that our current trajectory is unsustainable. Amid all this, it is dangerously easy to lose sight of a foundational question: What are we actually optimizing for?

Part of the answer lies in the visceral nature of the game. Unlike chess, football is physical to the point of absurdity. Grown adults in body armor crash into each other over what is essentially a leather egg. There's drama in every play. You don't need a PhD in physics to appreciate a one-handed catch while somersaulting over a defender like a caffeinated acrobat.

Psychology researcher and professor Lisa Miller in her book The Spiritual Child explains that spirituality often increases in adolescence. The teenage brain has a larger gap between experiencing and interpreting than in adulthood. As a result, adolescents' feelings are strong, dramatic and oscillate more wildly than the playground swing you so recently used to push them on.

The monks are part of a 2,300-mile pilgrimage for peace from a Buddhist temple in Fort Worth, Texas, across nine states to Washington DC. Dressed in vibrant orange robes, they have walked about 20 miles daily, eating one meal a day and practicing loving-kindness a form of mindfulness that can be thought of as a form of non-violent resistance. Their journey is a slow-moving meditation meant to embody peace, rather than argue for it.

When Serena Williams strode onto the Wimbledon grass, her legendary power was never in question. Her serve was crushing. Her backhand was unstoppable. But she wouldn't go to the net. She'd see a short ball, the kind that screams "approach," and she would hesitate to volley and miss the point. Serena was not playing at her full potential because of a story in her head.

I grew up in West Baltimore where I experienced homelessness for almost the entirety of high school. For me, philosophy emerged in situations of precarity and uncertainty. Those formative years, spent not so much in a single home as in a patchwork of many, shaped what are now some of my central philosophical concerns: belonging, exclusion, and the status of those at the margins of society, those at the threshold of belonging.