Myths of Charity: The Enduring Sham of Arthur Brooks

8 June 2015

Six years ago Arthur Brooks published Who Really Cares (which has gone through several subtitles, from America’s Charity Divide to Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why It Matters to The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism). This book is still triumphantly...

Some Good Stuff on Social Justice Responsibility

21 May 2015

Thank you, David Wong and Miri Mogilevsky! A girlfriend tipped me off to David Wong’s really amusing and spot-on 101 on why social justice (particularly regarding structural racism and sexism) is not about white guilt but about fixing what our ancestors broke....

Problems with the Mental Illness Model of Religion

8 April 2015

I posted over the past week several criticisms of Peter Boghossian that generally put me off him (especially this). I think he’s not a very good philosopher, and is far too wrong about far too many important things. Yesterday I expanded on one of those...

The Art of the Insult & The Sin of the Slur

24 August 2012

I am a colloquial speaker and writer, and a scrapper. I use wit and insults like the most of folks. But I have sometimes gone too far, and I take seriously the need to temper that. Which requires thinking through, philosophically, what counts as too far. And to that...

Proving History Now on Kindle

17 August 2012

My latest book Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus is now available for kindle. It should come available for nook soon (and possibly other formats, whatever past Prometheus titles have come available in: e.g. check The...