Philosophy & Religion

Nothing More Wondrous

A recent comparative study of medieval Christian and Islamic culture suggests that marvels offer common ground; wonder is a shared delight, a shared motive.

February 23, 2023 issue

Gary Shteyngart

Beyond the Pale

After the Russian Revolution, Jews left behind the shtetl and had to navigate a modern identity: New Soviet Man.

February 9, 2023 issue

Marilynne Robinson

A Theology of the Present Moment

Can bringing Scripture and science back into dialogue help answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing?

December 22, 2022 issue

Corey Robin

Empathy & the Economy

The left is still preoccupied with the decades-old debate over which is more important: recognition of our identities or material redistribution. Adam Smith ended that argument before it began.

December 8, 2022 issue

Malise Ruthven

The Long Reach of the Satanic Verses

The violent controversy over Salman Rushdie’s novel can be traced back to the early days of Islam.

September 25, 2022

Garry Wills

‘Don’t Call Me a Saint’

In her lifetime, Dorothy Day rejected canonization for herself. Now revived, this bad idea would only diminish the great founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

January 26, 2022

Corey Robin

Arendt and Roth: An Uncanny Convergence

Despite very different lives, the two writers not only knew and liked each other, but also found common cause in the great concerns that animated their work.

May 12, 2021

Martha C. Nussbaum

A Peopled Wilderness

We must find new ways to act toward animals in a world dominated everywhere by human power and activity.

December 8, 2022 issue

The Latest

Mark O’Connell

Hastening the End

Adam Kirsch’s Revolt Against Humanity is a survey of transhumanist thought, a diverse field united by cosmic pessimism.

April 20, 2023 issue

Anna Della Subin

A Body That’s Divine

A recent book catalogs the Old Testament’s physical descriptions of God, who ate, probably drank, got mistaken for an ordinary man, and was likely circumcised.

April 6, 2023 issue

Susan Neiman

Longing for Reconciliation

The philosopher Jacob Taubes was torn between the desire to heal the split between Judaism and Christianity— particularly between Germans and Jews—and his doubts that it was possible.

April 6, 2023 issue

Lucy Ives

What You Don’t Know Your Mind Knows

Renee Gladman’s drawings trouble the eye’s desire for cut-and-dried distinctions between word and image.

March 4, 2023

Rachel Nolan

An Amazonian Exodus

The discovery of a Bible led a Peruvian man on a decades-long process of conversion, leading him and his disciples to a settlement in the West Bank, where they became caught up in a demographic contest with Palestinians for the future of Israel.

March 9, 2023 issue

Tatiana Hollier

Enheduanna’s Brutal Muse

The poetry of the oldest known author, an Akkadian priestess in ancient Mesopotamia, transformed a goddess of fertility into a deity of destruction.

February 16, 2023

Sam Huber

Risk, Originality, Commitment

For Andrea Dworkin, literature and social change were always entwined.

January 26, 2023

William Dalrymple

Missionaries, Merlins, and Merchants

Recent scholarship illuminates how medieval Southeast Asia transformed Indian cultural and religious ideas brought to the region by monks and traders.

December 22, 2022 issue

Lynn Hunt

‘A Great Democratic Revolution’

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”

December 8, 2022 issue

Sara Lipton

The Jewish Authenticity Trap

Dara Horn’s fierce, often insightful cri de coeur presents a strangely selective picture of Jewishness, cropping a rich, messy, diverse, and complex history to fit into a tightly focused frame.

November 24, 2022 issue