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This advice, when you encounter it in the midst of a cycle of breath-shortening attacks, may sound cruel.

First, Weekes says, you must decide to truly experience the panic, to let it burst out into your fingers, your gut, your skull.

Then, sink into it like a warm pool.

Finally, rather than mentally kicking your legs to keep your nose out of the water, flip onto your back. “Stop holding tensely onto yourself,” she writes, “trying to control your fear, trying ‘to do something about it’ while subjecting yourself to constant self-analysis.” Just float through it, observing that it’s happening and recognizing that it will end.

Weekes promises that “every unwelcome sensation can be banished, and you can regain peace of mind and body.”

her advice, hard-earned through her own lifelong anxiety, which would wake her out of sleep to torment her, is so simple that “Hope and Help” essentially turns into a soothing repetition of two points.

First, that what we’re mostly afraid of is fear. And second, that “by your own anxiety you are producing the very feelings you dislike so much.”

you can best fight your panic by refusing to fight the panic.

And in short: It works.

a cultish devotion to her simple and direct advice means that today the book is prized by the readers, including me, whom it has guided out of emotional suffocation. A scroll through its Amazon reviews turns up one gushing convert after another.

Weekes’s work has the particular effect of pushing me to see that something lies beyond the moments of slip-sliding terror I f

this one has potent advice for the present moment, when many of us feel we must push back our disquiet more tenaciously than ever. If you’re afraid, then be afraid. You might float through to the other side.

I continue to believe, to walk the paths of faith, because I believe a story and continue to choose to believe that story. More precisely, I believe in a grand sacred history that has been given embodiment in a plurality of diverse narratives, epistles, and other sacred writings. I interpret these writings in ways literal and figurative and in ways between. While I don’t look to the books of the New Testament for a historical transcript of the life of Christ, I cling to the hope that they reveal a Divine Person and give flesh and blood anew to impossible events, namely the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension. On the one hand, my choice to believe the truth of these writings—writings that don’t perfectly add up, to be sure—is a decision to believe that an underlying thematic truth speaks through incredible, fantastical tales told to me by mostly unknown strangers, and passed down to me by figures holy and insidious, self-giving and power-hungry, saintly and vicious. On the other hand, I find some of those who have told and retold these stories, particularly the early Christian martyrs, to be credible witnesses. Those who have given their lives for Christ did so not merely in defiance of their murders, but as an act of witness embraced in the hope that their enemies would become their brothers and sisters. That kind of love strikes me as the height of love. And it’s been known to work wonders.

What does my faith give me? It gives me a love story. Not a story that explains love, but a story that gives birth to—and directs my heart, mind, and very being to—the fullest expression and fulfillment of love. It is a story that means everything if it means anything at all. It is a story about what it means to be human and what it means to be divine, both of which tell of what it means to love. My religion tells a love story about a humble God who reveals and who gives humanity, through the sacraments and other gifts, the grace to respond in faith, hope, and most importantly love. In this sacred romance, faith and hope are not ends in themselves, or even eternal things, but the temporal means to an eternal end. That end is love. According to this story, there is no need for faith or hope in heaven, and so you will not find them there. What you will find, if there is anything after death to find or a paradise to find it, is love.

My faith doesn’t free me from these unsettling possibilities. It doesn’t whisk me away from the battlefield like a protective Aphrodite. Instead, it fills me with fear and trembling and places me in the hopeless situation of not knowing what I love when I love my God. Yet I would not choose to be anywhere else. I’ve no interest in certainty, gnosis, or other false comforts. Nor do I wish to close the book of faith and place it on the bookshelf, unread, ignored and unlived. I intend to live according to a story I love, to share it with those I love, and to allow it to guide my steps and convert my soul, even though I journey to who knows where. And I intend as well to incline an ear to the voice of alterity, to reasons and rhymes that might expose my faith to its undoing.

the really painful message our daughter will receive is that we're embarrassing. For most people who aren't New Atheists, or old atheists, and have no passion invested in the subject, either negative or positive, believers aren't weird because we're wicked. We're weird because we're inexplicable; because, when there's no necessity for it that anyone sensible can see, we've committed ourselves to a set of awkward and absurd attitudes that obtrude, that stick out against the background of modern life, and not in some important or respectworthy or principled way, either.

Believers are people who try to insert Jee-zus into conversations at parties; who put themselves down, with writhings of unease, for perfectly normal human behaviour; who are constantly trying to create a solemn hush that invites a fart, a hiccup, a bit of subversion. Believers are people who, on the rare occasions when you have to listen to them, like at a funeral or a wedding, seize the opportunity to pour the liquidised content of a primary-school nativity play into your earhole, apparently not noticing that childhood is over.

What goes on inside believers is mysterious. So far as it can be guessed at it appears to be a kind of anxious pretending, a kind of continual, nervous resistance to reality.

to me, it's belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending – pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture.

The atheist bus says: "There's probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life."

the word that offends against realism here is "enjoy". I'm sorry – enjoy your life?

What's so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? Well, in the first place, that it buys a bill of goods, sight unseen, from modern marketing. Given that human life isn't and can't be made up of enjoyment, it is in effect accepting a picture of human life in which those pieces of living where easy enjoyment is more likely become the only pieces that are visible.

The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren't being "worried" by us believers and our hellfire preaching. Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure

If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you'd think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income. And you'd think the same thing if you got your information exclusively from the atheist bus

But then, like every human being, I am not in the habit of entertaining only those emotions I can prove. I'd be an unrecognisable oddity if I did. Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue. Yet emotions are also our indispensable tool for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn't susceptible to proof or disproof, that isn't checkable against the physical universe. We dream, hope, wonder, sorrow, rage, grieve, delight, surmise, joke, detest; we form such unprovable conjectures as novels or clarinet concertos; we imagine. And religion is just a part of that, in one sense. It's just one form of imagining, absolutely functional, absolutely human-normal. It would seem perverse, on the face of it, to propose that this one particular manifestation of imagining should be treated as outrageous, should be excised if (which is doubtful) we can manage it.

suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, you are povertystricken, or desperate for a job, or a drug addict, or social services have just taken away your child. The bus tells you that there's probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, and now the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it's true, is that anyone who isn't enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. What the bus says is: there's no help coming.

let's be clear about the emotional logic of the bus's message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation

A consolation you could believe in would be one that wasn't in danger of popping like a soap bubble on contact with the ordinary truths about us. A consolation you could trust would be one that acknowledged the difficult stuff rather than being in flight from it, and then found you grounds for hope in spite of it, or even because of it

The novelist Richard Powers has written that the Clarinet Concerto sounds the way mercy would sound, and that's exactly how I experienced it in 1997. Mercy, though, is one of those words that now requires definition. It does not only mean some tyrant's capacity to suspend a punishment he has himself inflicted. It can mean – and does mean in this case – getting something kind instead of the sensible consequences of an action, or as well as the sensible consequences of an action.

from outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don't talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue.

I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don't have the feelings because I've assented to the ideas.

what I felt listening to Mozart in 1997 is not some wishy-washy metaphor for an idea I believe in, and it's not a front behind which the real business of belief is going on: it's the thing itself. My belief is made of, built up from, sustained by, emotions like that. That's what makes it real.

I think that Mozart, two centuries earlier, had succeeded in creating a beautiful and accurate report of an aspect of reality. I think that the reason reality is that way – that it is in some ultimate sense merciful as well as being a set of physical processes all running along on their own without hope of appeal, all the way up from quantum mechanics to the relative velocity of galaxies by way of "blundering, low and horridly cruel" biology (Darwin) – is that the universe is sustained by a continual and infinitely patient act of love. I think that love keeps it in being.

That's what I think. But it's all secondary. It all comes limping along behind my emotional assurance that there was mercy, and I felt it. And so the argument about whether the ideas are true or not, which is the argument that people mostly expect to have about religion, is also secondary for me.

No, I can't prove it. I don't know that any of it is true. I don't know if there's a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn't the kind of thing you can know. It isn't a knowable item.)

Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion. To say that life is to be enjoyed (just enjoyed) is like saying that mountains should only have summits, or that all colours should be purple, or that all plays should be by Shakespeare. This really is a bizarre category error.

It's got itself established in our culture, relatively recently, that the emotions involved in religious belief must be different from the ones involved in all the other kinds of continuous imagining, hoping, dreaming, and so on, that humans do. These emotions must be alien, freakish, sad, embarrassing, humiliating, immature, pathetic. These emotions must be quite separate from commonsensical us. But they aren't

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

It's just that the emotions in question are rarely talked about apart from their rationalisation into ideas. This is what I have tried to do in my new book, Unapologetic.

You can easily look up what Christians believe in. You can read any number of defences of Christian ideas. This, however, is a defence of Christian emotions – of their intelligibility, of their grown-up dignity.

I heard Floyd scream "Mama," and through my tears, even though I knew the events in the video had already unfolded to a tragic conclusion, I was still ready to fight. He wasn't my baby, but he was someone's child. And he needed someone with a mother's love to help him

I'm tired of being scared for him. I'm tired of reading about Ahmaud, Travis, George and so many others. The list never stops. I need the white mamas to share this burden. I need my white friends to love me and mine enough to come running, too.

While I'm waiting for white mothers to come running, to let me rest for just a moment while they carry the baton for a bit, I have a special thank you for my friend Stacie. I'm blessed with a multi-cultural array of friends. Stacie personifies compassion, sensitivity, godliness and intellect. She knows the world sees and treats her differently because she's white, financially comfortable and socially connected. In her heart, she's just a mama like me.

My baby calls me every time he's caught being black -- the security officer trailing him in the Harvard museum while he waited for his friend's commencement to start last May.

And the white woman who scurried away from the ladies' room on his college campus, presumably because he was walking toward her? Wasn't he just going in the same direction to use the adjacent men's room?

I need them to hear that cry and to tell their sons and daughters that my child is a human. I need them to declare and believe that he's in danger, that I can't protect him by myself and that his life matters to me and to them. I need them to tell their white friends' children, too. My child's life is sacred. My child is not dangerous.

She sees my blackness and the pain it brings. She'd never declare, as too many do, that she "doesn't see color." She sees it because she truly sees me. She knows it shapes how I see the world and how the world sees me. She knows my son, and she authentically cares about him. She knows I'm hurting without my having to tell her. And one mama to another, she cared.

My own view of these things is that we simply do not know enough to judge the ultimate truth of the claims of theology. (I’m with Hamlet, who remarked to Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth … than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”) Perhaps we will one day; perhaps not. Meanwhile, given that religious faith is an intrinsic element of human experience, it is best to approach and engage the subject with a sense of history and a critical sensibility.

In his view that faith was “not a possession but a hope,” Hamilton was tapping into an ancient tradition. As the author of the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews wrote, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”—in this sense, religious faith is way of interpreting experience that allows for the possibility of the redemptive. Faith in this sense assumes that scripture and tradition are the works of human hands and hearts, efforts undertaken to explain the seemingly inexplicable. Faith in this sense is inextricably tied to doubt; it is an attempt, sometimes successful and sometimes not, to squint and struggle to “see through a glass darkly,” as Paul wrote in Corinthians. Faith without such doubt has never been part of the Christian tradition; it is telling, I think, that one of the earliest resurrection scenes in the Bible is that of Thomas demanding evidence—he wanted to see, to touch, to prove. Those who question and probe and debate are heirs of the apostles just as much as the most fervent of believers.

“One of the things that we are feeling better about is the data around SARS-CoV-2 transmission and recognizing that outdoor activities have not turned out, as best as we can tell, to be a significant factor in pushing the pandemic forward,” Brewer said, referring to the fact that the threat of virus spread is low in socially distant, outdoor settings

People who are vaccinated can also spend time indoors with unvaccinated, low-risk people from a single household.

“If you look at what’s happening with cases in particular, they’ve really fallen off since the beginning of January,” Brewer said. “It’s really hard to attribute that to population changes; something else has to be driving that. It couldn’t have been vaccines at that point, we didn’t have as many vaccines as we do now.”

“I continue to look for signals and continue to scrutinize the data, but so far I’m encouraged by the fact that we haven’t seen a real rise in case numbers particularly in the states where they have reported the variants,” said Nuzzo, who has been tracking COVID-19 trends and data since the pandemic’s beginning.

The irony gnawed at me: My entire vocation as an investigative reporter was predicated on being able to reveal truths, and yet I could not even rustle up the evidence to convince my own mother that our 45th president was not, in fact, the hero she believed him to be. Or, for that matter, that John F. Kennedy Jr. was dead. Or that Tom Hanks had not been executed for drinking the blood of children.

The theories spun from Q’s messages seemed much easier to disprove. Oprah Winfrey couldn’t have been detained during a wave of deep state arrests because we could still see her conducting live interviews on television. Trump’s 4th of July speech at Mount Rushmore came to an end without John F. Kennedy Jr. revealing he was alive and stepping in as the president’s new running mate. The widespread blackouts that her Patriot friend’s “source from the Pentagon” had warned about failed to materialize. And I could testify firsthand that the CIA had no control over my newsroom’s editorial decisions.

“I believe the Holy Spirit led me to the QAnons to discover the truth which is being suppressed,” she texted me. “Otherwise, how would I be able to know the truth if the lamestream media suppresses the truth?”

Through the years, I’d battled against conspiracy theories my mom threw at me that were far more formidable than QAnon. I’d been stumped when she asked me to prove that Beyoncé wasn’t an Illuminati member, dumbfounded when research studies I sent her weren’t enough to reach an agreement on vaccine efficacy, and too worn down to say anything more than “that’s not true” when confronted with false allegations of murders committed by prominent politicians.

Eventually, I accepted the impasse. It didn’t seem healthy that every conversation we had would devolve into a circuitous debate about which one of us was on the side of the bad guys. So I tried to pick my battles.

But what I had dismissed as damaging inconsistencies turned out to be the core strength of the belief system: It was alive, flexible, sprouting more questions than answers, more clues to study, an investigation playing out in real time, with the fate of the world at stake.

With no overlap between our filters of reality, I was at a loss for any facts that would actually stick.

Meanwhile, she wondered where she’d gone wrong with me

She regretted not taking politics more seriously when I was younger. I’d grown up blinkered by American privilege, trained to ignore the dirty machinations securing my comforts. My mom had shed that luxury long ago.

The year my mom began falling down QAnon rabbit holes, I turned the age she was when she first arrived in the States. By then, I was no longer sure that America was worth the cost of her migration. When the real estate market collapsed under the weight of Wall Street speculation, she had to sell our house at a steep loss to avoid foreclosure and her budding career as a realtor evaporated. Her near–minimum wage jobs weren’t enough to cover her bills, so her credit card debts rose. She delayed retirement plans because she saw no path to breaking even anytime soon, though she was hopeful that a turnaround was on the horizon. Through the setbacks and detours, she drifted into the arms of the people and beliefs I held most responsible for her troubles.

With a fervor I knew was futile, I’d tell my mom she was missing the real conspiracy: The powerful people shaping policy to benefit their own interests, to maintain wealth and white predominance, through tax cuts and voter suppression, were commandeering her support solely by catering to her stance on the one issue she cared most about.

The voice my mom trusted most now was Trump’s. Our disagreements were no longer ideological to her but part of a celestial conflict.

“I love you but you have to be on the side of good,” she texted me. “Im sad cuz u have become part of the deep state. May God have mercy on you...I pray you will see the truth of the evil agenda and be on the side of Trump.”

She likened her fellow Patriots to the early Christians who spread the word of Jesus at the risk of persecution. She often sent me a meme with a caption about “ordinary people who spent countless hours researching, debating, meditating and praying” for the truth to be revealed to them. “Although they were mocked, dismissed and cast off, they knew their souls had agreed long ago to do this work.”

Last summer, as my mom marched in a pink MAGA hat amid maskless crowds, and armed extremists stalked racial justice protests, and a disputed election loomed like a time bomb, I entertained my darkest thoughts about the fate of our country. Was there any hope in a democracy without a shared set of basic facts? Had my elders fled one authoritarian regime only for their children to face another? Amid the gloom, I found only a single morsel of solace: My mom was as hopeful as she’d ever been.

I wish I could offer some evidence showing that the gulf between us might be narrowing, that my love, persistence, and collection of facts might be enough to draw her back into a reality we share, and that when our wager about the storm comes due in a few months, she’ll realize that the voices she trusts have been lying to her. But I don’t think that will happen

What can I do but try to limit the damage? Send my mom movie recommendations to occupy the free time she instead spends on conspiracy research. Shift our conversations to the common ground of cooking recipes and family gossip. Raise objections when her beliefs nudge her toward dangerous decisions.

I now understand our debates as marks of the very bond I thought was disintegrating. No matter how far she believes I’ve fallen into the deep state, how hard I fight for the forces of evil, how imminent the grand plan’s rapture, my mom will be there on the other side of the line putting in a good word for me with the angels and saints, trying to save me from damnation. And those are the two realities we live in. ●

understand

now understand our debates as marks of the very bond I thought was disintegrating. No matter how far she believes I’ve fallen into the deep state, how hard I fight for the forces of evil, how imminent the grand plan’s rapture, my mom will be there on the other side of the line putting in a good word for me with the angels and saints, trying to save me from damnation. And those are the two realities we live in. ●

“To always think of imagination as a good thing is a danger. A lot of people can’t imagine good, joyful hopeful things because they are not able to or their lives have had so much difficulty that it feels foolhardy to.”

Silver linings aside, it will take many, many more instances of coordinated response to stop a movement generations in the making. In more than a decade of studying the earlier white power movement, I have become familiar with the themes of underground activity that are today clearly drawing from the earlier movement. In the absence of decisive action across multiple institutions, a rich record of criminal activity and violence will continue to provide these activists with a playbook for further chaos.

The Base, furthermore, is what experts call "accelerationist," meaning that its members hope to provoke what they see as an inevitable race war. They have conducted paramilitary training in the Pacific Northwest. Both of these strategies date back to the 1980s, when the Order trained in those forests with hopes of provoking the same race war.

One of the men arrested Thursday was formerly a reservist in the Canadian Army, where he received training in explosives and demolition, according to the New York Times. This kind of preparation, too, is common among extremists like these. To take just a few representative examples, in the 1960s, Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Marine trained in demolition, helped fellow members of the United Klans of America to bomb the 16th Street Birmingham Baptist Church, killing four black girls.

This news out of Virginia shows that there is a real social benefit when people direct their attention to these events -- and sustain the public conversation about the presence of a renewed white-power movement and what it means for our society.

"In terms of moderation, we have a lot of thoughts — we're trying to move very slowly and intentionally around what the experience is like," Austin said. "I will say, unequivocally, that we won't allow any language that revolves around hate and all the encompassing ways of what that can mean."

"[We're] definitely [going] for scale, but I think in scale there can be very different groups inside that space," Austin said. "I think fragmentation has been happening since the beginning of the internet, we just had these larger conglomerates come in and bring everyone to that space."

Botton’s central obsession is the insane ways bourgeois postmoderns try to live, namely in a perpetual upward swing of ambition and achievement, where failure indicates character deficiency despite an almost total lack of social infrastructure to help us navigate careers, relationships, parenting, and death. But he seems uninterested in how those structures were destroyed or what it might take to rebuild them

Botton wants to keep bourgeois secularism and add a few new quasi-religious social routines. Quasi-religious social routines may indeed be a part of the solution, as we shall see, but they cannot be simply flung atop a regime as indifferent to human values as liberal capitalism.

Citizens see the structure behind the façade and lose faith in the myth of the state as a dispassionate, egalitarian arbiter of conflict. Once theological passions can no longer be sublimated in material affluence and the fiction of representative democracy, it is little surprise to see them break out in movements that are, on both the left and the right, explicitly hostile to the liberal state.

Western politics have an auto-immune disorder: they are structured to pretend that their notions of reason, right, and sovereignty are detached from a deeply theological heritage. When pressed by war and economic dysfunction, liberal ideas prove as compatible with zealotry and domination as any others.

Secularism is not strictly speaking a religion, but it represents an orientation toward religion that serves the theological purpose of establishing a hierarchy of legitimate social values. Religion must be “privatized” in liberal societies to keep it out of the way of economic functioning. In this view, legitimate politics is about making the trains run on time and reducing the federal deficit; everything else is radicalism. A surprising number of American intellectuals are able to persuade themselves that this vision of politics is sufficient, even though the train tracks are crumbling, the deficit continues to gain on the GDP, and millions of citizens are sinking into the dark mire of debt and permanent unemployment.

Critchley has made a career forging a philosophical account of human ethical responsibility and political motivation. His question is: after the rational hopes of the Enlightenment corroded into nihilism, how do humans write a believable story about what their existence means in the world? After the death of God, how do we account for our feelings of moral responsibility, and how might that account motivate us to resist the deadening political system we face?

The question is what to do in the face of the unmistakable religious and political nihilism currently besetting Western democracies.

both Botton and Critchley believe the solution involves what Derrida called a “religion without religion”—for Critchley a “faith of the faithless,” for Botton a “religion for atheists.”

a new political becoming will require a complete break with the status quo, a new political sphere that we understand as our own deliberate creation, uncoupled from the theological fictions of natural law or God-given rights

Critchley proposes as the foundation of politics “the poetic construction of a supreme fiction … a fiction that we know to be a fiction and yet in which we believe nonetheless.” Following the French philosopher Alain Badiou and the Apostle Paul, Critchley conceives political “truth” as something like fidelity: a radical loyalty to the historical moment where true politics came to life.

But unlike an evangelist, Critchley understands that attempting to fill the void with traditional religion is to slip back into a slumber that reinforces institutions desperate to maintain the political and economic status quo. Only in our condition of brokenness and finitude, uncomforted by promises of divine salvation, can we be open to a connection with others that might mark the birth of political resistance

This is the crux of the difference between Critchley’s radical faithless faith and Botton’s bourgeois secularism. Botton has imagined religion as little more than a coping mechanism for the “terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability,” seemingly unaware that the pain and vulnerability may intensify many times over. It won’t be enough to simply to sublimate our terror in confessional restaurants and atheist temples. The recognition of finitude, the weight of our nothingness, can hollow us into a different kind of self: one without illusions or reputations or private property, one with nothing but radical openness to others. Only then can there be the possibility of meaning, of politics, of hope.

we can trace the major disasters of 20th century politics to the impeccably optimistic doctrines of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and the many others for whom progress was the inevitable tendency of history. Pessimism, so obviously vindicated in retrospect, is almost always ineffective at the time. Why is this?

Our approaches to questions of that kind have been strongly influenced in recent years by evolutionary psychology, which tells us that we are endowed with traits of character and patterns of feeling that were “adaptive” in the conditions from which human societies first emerged. And what was adaptive then might be profoundly maladaptive today, in the mass societies that we ourselves have created. It was adaptive in those small bands of hunter-gatherers to join the crowd, to persecute the doubter, to go cheerfully forward against the foe. And from these traits have sprung certain patterns of thinking that serve the vital purpose of preventing people from perceiving the truth, when the truth will discourage them.

these three convictions do not include the belief that the specific teachings of the Catholic Church provide the fundamental truths of human life.  What I do believe is that these teachings are very helpful for understanding the human condition.  Here I distinguish three domains: metaphysical doctrines about the existence and nature of God, historical accounts from the Bible of how God has intervened in human history to reveal his truth and the ethics of love preached by Jesus.

The ethics of love I revere as the inspiration for so many (Catholics and others) who have led exemplary moral lives.  I don’t say that this ethics is the only exemplary way to live or that we have anything near to an adequate understanding of it.  But I know that it has been a powerful force for good. 

As to the theistic metaphysics, I’m agnostic about it taken literally, but see it as a superb intellectual construction that provides a fruitful context for understanding how our religious and moral experiences are tied to the ethics of love.  The historical stories, I maintain, are best taken as parables illustrating moral and metaphysical teachings.

I reverse this order, putting first the ethics of love as a teaching that directly captivates our moral sensibility, then taking the history and metaphysics as helpful elucidations of the ethics.

Catholicism too has reconciled itself to the Enlightenment view of religion.

First, the Church now explicitly acknowledges the right of an individual’s conscience in religious matters: No one may “be prevented from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters”  (“Catechism of the Catholic Church,” citing a decree from the Second Vatican Council).

Second, the Church, in practice, hardly ever excludes from its community those who identity themselves as Catholics but reinterpret central teachings (and perhaps reject less central ones).  The “faithful” who attend Mass, receive the sacraments, send their children to Catholic schools and sometimes even teach theology include many who hold views similar to mine.   Church leaders have in effect agreed that the right to follow one’s conscience includes the right of dissident Catholics to remain members of the Church.

there is deep disagreement within the Church about how its core doctrines, including those about the hierarchy’s authority, should be understood.  With the Second Vatican Council, the hierarchy began a move toward the liberal position, which the successors of John XXIII have tried to reverse.  But history shows that Catholics play in a very long game, and there is no reason to give up hope for a new blossoming of the liberal buds.

Critics outside the Church will ask how I adhere to an institution that has so many deep flaws.  My first response is that the Catholic tradition of thought and practice is the only stance toward religion that, in William James’s phrase, is a “live option” for me — the only place I feel at home.  Simply to renounce it would be, as I said at the outset, to lose my self-respect — to deny part of my moral core.

My second response is that the liberal drive for reform is the best hope of saving the Church.  Its greatest present danger is precisely the loss of the members whom the hierarchy and the rest of the conservative core want to marginalize.  I’m not willing to abandon the Church to them.

"Textbooks are useful as background narrative. It's difficult to talk about the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution if students don't know where Vietnam is, or the Lincoln-Douglas debates if they don't know who Abe Lincoln was before he was Daniel Day-Lewis.

The website's lessons have been downloaded 800,000 times and spawned a lively online community of history educators grateful for the camaraderie

just 30 percent of the people who teach history-related courses in U.S. public high schools both majored in the field and are certified to teach it.

" By reading these challenging documents and discovering history for themselves, he says, "not only will they remember the content, they'll develop skills for life."

Teachers can download the lessons and adapt them for their own purposes, free of charge. Students learn how to examine documents critically, just as historians would, in order to answer intriguing questions: Did Pocahontas really rescue John Smith? Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? Who blinked first in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians or the Americans?

But when a ten-pound textbook becomes the script for a whole year's worth of instruction, a precious learning opportunity is lost. "Many students go through their entire middle and high school and never encounter the actual voice of a historical participant,"

The Common Core curriculum will bring radical changes in the standardized state tests that youngsters have been taking for decades. Instead of filling in multiple-choice bubbles, they will be expected to write out short answers that demonstrate their ability to analyze texts, and then cite those texts to support arguments—the exact skills that Reading Like a Historian fosters.

Wineburg realized that the art of historical thinking is not something that comes naturally to most people; it has to be cultivated. Students have to be taught to look at the source of a document before reading it, figure out the context in which it was written, and cross-check it with other sources before coming to a conclusion.

In 2008, Reisman was ready to conduct a test of the curriculum at five schools in the San Francisco Unified School District. As expected, students in the test classes showed an increased ability to retain historical knowledge, as well as a greater appreciation for history, compared to the control group. What took everyone by surprise, though, was how much the test students advanced in basic reading.

Fremont 11th grader Ayanna Black agrees. "In other history courses I have taken, I wasn't able to fully understand what was going on. It seemed that it was just a bunch of words I had to memorize for a future test," she says. "Now that I contextualize the information I am given, it helps me understand not only what is being said but also the reason behind it." The approach, she says, "leads me to remembering the information out of curiosity, rather than trying to pass a test."

Scholars in the Stanford History Education Group hope to develop more online lesson plans in world history

Wineburg devoured history books as a kid and did well in Advanced Placement courses at his public high school. But when he entered Brown University, he was shocked at how ill-prepared he was in the subject. Employed after college as a high school history teacher, he saw similar weaknesses in his students. "The best ones could repeat what the text said," he recalls, "but when I asked them to critically examine whether they believed the text, I could have been speaking Martian."

Wineburg and his PhD students have teamed up with the library on another project: a website called Beyond the Bubble,where teachers can learn how to evaluate their students using short written tests called History Assessments of Thinking. Each HAT asks students to consider a historical document—a letter drawn from the archives of the NAACP, for example—and justify their conclusions about it in three or four sentences. By scanning the responses, teachers can determine quickly whether their pupils are grasping basic concepts.

Wineburg hopes to make Reading Like a Historian lesson plans completely paperless, with exercise sheets that can be filled out on a laptop or tablet computer.

Though the work has been hard in history this year, she appreciates what it's taught her. "I've learned that you don't just read what is put in front of you and accept it, which is what I had been doing with my textbook all summer," she explains. "It can be frustrating to analyze documents that are contradictory, but I'm coming to appreciate that history is a collection of thousands of accounts and perspectives, and it's our job to interpret it."

There were no priests in Peter’s time, and no popes. Paul never called himself or any of his co-workers priests. He did not offer sacrifice. Those ideas came in later, through weird arguments contained in the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews. The claim of priests and popes to be the sole conduits of grace is a remnant of the era of papal monarchy. We are watching that era fade.

According to Margolis, people don’t change their minds unless they move along the horizontal dimension. Intuition is what most matters for belief. Yet a moral argument generally consists of round after round of reasoning. Each person tries to pull the other along the vertical dimension.

if your opponent succeeds in defeating your reasons, you are unlikely to change your judgment. You’ve been dragged into the upper-left quadrant, but you still feel, intuitively, that it’s wrong

This, I suggest, is how moral arguments proceed when people have strong intuitions anchoring their beliefs. And intuitions are rarely stronger than when they are part of our partisan identities. So I’m not saying that reasons “play no role in moral judgment.” In fact, four of the six links in my Social Intuitionist Model are reasoning links. Most of what’s going on during an argu

ment is reasoning

I’m saying that reason is far less powerful than intuition, so if you’re arguing (or deliberating) with a partner who lives on the other side of the political spectrum from you, and you approach issues such as abortion, gay marriage or income inequality with powerfully different intuitive reactions, you are unlikely to effect any persuasion no matter how good your arguments and no matter how much time you give your opponent to reflect upon your logic.

as an intuitionist, I see hope in an approach to deliberative democracy that uses social psychology to calm the passions and fears that make horizontal movement so difficult.

One of the issues I am most passionate about is political civility. I co-run a site at www.CivilPolitics.org where we define civility as “the ability to disagree with others while respecting their sincerity and decency.” We explain our goals like this: “We believe this ability [civility] is best fostered by indirect methods (changing contexts, payoffs and institutions) rather than by direct methods (such as pleading with people to be more civil, or asking people to sign civility pledges).” In other words, we hope to open up space for civil disagreement by creating contexts in which elephants (automatic processes and intuitions) are calmer, rather than by asking riders (controlled processes, including reasoning) to try harder.

We are particularly interested in organizations that try to create a sense of community and camaraderie as a precondition for political discussions.

if you want to persuade someone, talk to the elephant first. Trigger the right intuitions first.

This is why there has been such rapid movement on gay marriage and gay rights. It’s not because good arguments have suddenly appeared, which nobody thought of in the 1990s

younger people, who grew up knowing gay people and seeing gay couples on television, have no such disgust. For them, the arguments are much more persuasive.

I love Aristotle’s emphasis on habit — and I had a long section on virtue ethics in Chapter 6 that got cut at the last minute, but which I have just now posted online here

philosophers have the best norms for good thinking that I have ever encountered. When my work is critiqued by a philosopher I can be certain that he or she has read me carefully, including the footnotes, and will not turn me into a straw man. More than any other subculture I know, the philosophical community embodies the kinds of normative pressures for reason-giving and responsiveness to reasons that Allan Gibbard describes in “Wise Choices, Apt Feelings.”