Did you hear the latest revelation about the spiritual life of the late Pope John Paul II? Excerpt: Pope John Paul II not only practiced severe bodily penance – including whipping himself with a belt and sleeping on the floor- but also wrote a letter in which he offered his resignation in the case he…

Yesterday I was discussing with a colleague the role religion has in guiding moral behavior among individuals and groups. Is it possible to demonstrate empirically that religion lowers rates of crime and anti-social behavior? My thought was that the question is too broad, that the more interesting and precise question is: What kind of religion…

As some of you who have tried to friend me, or otherwise engage me on Facebook know, I’m definitely not much of an FB user. I almost never check my page, mostly because I am already overburdened with more information than I can manage, and am skittish about privacy concerns. For example, I hate that…

Here’s a favorable review in today’s NYTimes of a new book, “The Trauma Myth,” by a Harvard psychologist. Here’s the book’s gist: For a graduate research project at Harvard in the mid-1990s, the psychologist Susan A. Clancy arranged to interview adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, expecting to confirm the conventional wisdom that the more…

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