Ancient Hebrew Poetry

Stanley Fish takes aim at Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker

    Why do scholars in the humanities take pleasure in deflating the pretensions of their colleagues in the hard sciences? Why does someone like Fish enjoy landing a few punches on the noses of the likes of Dawkins and Pinker? I have a theory; it goes like this: hard scientists are sometimes clueless when it comes to epistemology, that is, the study of justified belief.

The Life and Death of Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

    How shall we remember Christopher Hitchens? For his short-fused, slashing style? No one was more accomplished than he at firing rhetorical salvos at real or imaginary enemies. “Cry for Guatemala, with a corpse in every gate, if I had a rocket launcher, I would retaliate.” Whether or not Hitchens knew the lyrics of that Bruce Cockburn song, he agreed with them - more, I suspect, than Cockburn their author did. In the words of an ideology he never entirely relinquished, for Hitchens, “fascism means war” – which cuts both ways. It meant that Hitchens was anything but a pacifist.

Haiti, God, and James Wood’s caricature of the response of believers

James Wood is appalled by the kind of thing believers say when disaster strikes. The tone of his editorial makes one wonder if he can speak about the approach to life he opposes – belief in God - without caricaturing it.

Why the confirmation of Francis Collins to head the NIH is a good thing

The US Senate has confirmed Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health by a unanimous vote. Among believers and atheists alike, Collins is best known for his book entitled The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006). As Lisa Miller puts it: