Philosophy & Religion

Unwanted Thoughts

Robin Vose’s new history of the Index of Prohibited Books shows how Catholic censorship was, despite its totalizing ambitions, often incoherent and contradictory.

June 8, 2023 issue

Marina Warner

Temporale

During the pandemic I picked up the Catholic missal of my childhood, and it made me think again about its function: marking the passage of time.

April 14, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Latest

Elaine Blair

Uninhibited Questions

In Porn: An Oral History, Polly Barton argues that after decades of exhaustive debate there is still something lacking in the discourse on pornography.

December 21, 2023 issue

Linda Greenhouse

An Unhealthy Definition of Rights

For the new majority on the Supreme Court, religious liberty takes precedence over the government’s power to protect public health.

December 21, 2023 issue

Robert Darnton

The Dream of a Universal Library

Digitization promised to democratize learning, and despite countervailing forces the trend is toward more open access. But is an ‘Alexandria in the cloud’ really an open sesame?

December 21, 2023 issue

John Banville

Back to the State of Nature

John Gray argues in The New Leviathans that only Thomas Hobbes can explain how a liberal civilization based on tolerance came to an end, and what we have lost in abandoning it.

December 21, 2023 issue

Johannes von Moltke

Embracing Anonymity

The critic and novelist Siegfried Kracauer returned repeatedly to anonymity as a theme in his work, and a new biography insists on his desire for anonymity in his life as well.

November 23, 2023 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Defying Tribalism

In her new polemic, the philosopher Susan Neiman charges her fellow leftists with intellectual betrayal and calls for a return to universal ideals of justice and humanity.

November 2, 2023 issue

Namwali Serpell

‘Such Womanly Touches’

Is there such a thing as a female style?

November 2, 2023 issue

Martha C. Nussbaum

Where the Orcas Swim

The death that humans inflict on whales today has little to do with demand for meat or blubber. We may think of whaling as a bygone practice, but it is ongoing, pervasive, and implicates us all.

November 2, 2023 issue