From the NYT article announcing the results of the Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey:

The new report sheds light on the beliefs of the unaffiliated. Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, 70 percent of the unaffiliated said they believed in God, including one of every five people who identified themselves as atheist…

I didn’t think it possible, but this article on the work of anthropologist James Dow actually makes Richard Dawkins’s take on religion sound subtle:

God may work in mysterious ways, but a simple computer program may explain how religion evolved.

By distilling religious belief into a genetic predisposition to pass along unverifiable information, the program predicts that religion will flourish. However, religion only takes hold if non-believers help believers out–perhaps because they are impressed by their devotion.

Ecce Monstrum, Jeremy Biles’s study of Georges Bataille, got a nice review by Tomasz Swoboda over at H-Ideas recently. Here’s the upshot:

All in all, among recent studies on Bataille, Biles’s book is the one that perhaps approaches best Bataille’s thought while proposing new interpretations of his work. Indeed, readers who are not familiar with Bataille’s work will be rather well introduced to its main aspects. At the same time, specialized readers will find in Biles’s book reformulations and reinterpretations that will likely become pivotal in Bataillean studies.

The book came out with Fordham University Press last year and is available for purchase (at an awfully steep $65) here.

From a U. of Chicago email announcing the establishment of the Milton Friedman Institute:

The Milton Friedman Institute will occupy buildings that currently house the Chicago Theological Seminary on the north side of 58th Street between Woodlawn and University.

I’ve been waiting for someone to write a good long piece about the phenomenon that some have named the New Atheism: i.e. the rash of books by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and others whose express intent has been to hasten the disappearance of religion as a cultural force. The article I wanted to read would have less to do with pushing back against the arguments in these books than it would with trying to explain the phenomenon of their collective appearance.

The most obvious question that this imaginary inquiry would tackle would be the question of timing: why did so many of these books appear all at once? (more…)

My friend Ben Calhoun did a nice NPR story on Jeremiah Wright this last weekend. Listen to it here.