Content on Behavior
What Does Judaism Have to Say About Privacy?
What do we give away when we compromise our privacy?
Don’t Try To Be the Hero of Your Story
Maybe rather than seeing ourselves as the hero of our story, we can view ourselves more as the protagonist – the one who struggles and who fails, and is deeply imperfect.
The Quarantine Reviewed
Like all of our work on these High Holy Days, a “User Review” draws us out of our own individual concern and calls us to see the wider world around us.
Balaam and Abraham: What They See, and What They Miss
When do we see the blessings in front of us, and when do we miss them? Or, conversely, when do we see the problems in front of us, and when do we miss those?
Debugging Ritual: A Conversation With Dr. David DeSteno
What job does ritual get done?
The Varieties of Transcendent Experience: A Conversation With David B. Yaden, PhD
David B. Yaden, PhD researches two topics in psychology that may be more (or less?) religious than they seem: professional callings and transcendent experiences.
The Symbolism of Old Gods and the U.S. Capitol Assault
As people unmoored from vertically transmitted traditions cast desperately around for something to believe in, things are going to get weird. No, scratch that. Weirder.
COVID-19 and Our Future: A Conversation with Dr. Nicholas Christakis
A conversation with Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis – sociologist, physician, and author of “Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live.”
The Human Need for Culture
People need tribes and culture – things that liberalism tends to dissolve.
Moral Proximity in a Time of Social Distance
The difficulty of judging our need for physical distance can turn into something much worse: moral distance.
The Reality of the Coronavirus is Changing Our Social Reality, Too
Rituals transform social facts into physical realities, and so the coronavirus is forcing us to change, adapt, or maybe even lose some of those concrete and physical connections.
Can Liturgy Be Empirically Tested?
What happens in our bodies and in our brains when we join together in a communal liturgy, where people sing or dance or celebrate together?