By PETER S. STEINFELS

Why can’t religion and the Enlightenment be friends? What’s that, you say? They were friends? Why didn’t anyone tell us?
Well, David Sorkin has. A professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin, he argues in a new study that religion and the Enlightenment were even more than friends.
“In the [...]

By NICHOLAS WADE
IN the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.
During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena [...]

By DOMINIQUE BROWNING
New York Times

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A BOOK OF SILENCE

By Sara Maitland

We live in noise. The world is a booming, rustling, buzzing place to begin with (though many of us have shut out nature’s clamor), and to that we have added every conceivable vibration of our own making and every possible means of assault, [...]

By Robert Wright
This Friday I’m heading up to rural Massachusetts in hopes of getting born again — again.
Six years ago, in the same locale, I attended my first and only silent meditation retreat. It was just about the most amazing experience of my life. Certainly it seemed more dramatic than my very first born-again [...]

PHILADELPHIA - Religion and science can combine to create some thorny questions: Does God exist outside the human mind, or is God a creation of our brains? Why do we have faith in things that we cannot prove, whether it’s the afterlife or UFOs?
The new Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of [...]