It’s that time of year again. Time for misguided efforts to offer “scientific” explanations of  the Christmas star—the star that, according to the gospel of Matthew, guided the three “wise man from the East” to the pinpoint location in Bethlehem where the recently born Jesus could be found (Matthew 2: 1–11). Among the explanations offered …

The most prominent blurb on the cover of Dan Barker’s new book, Contraduction, sums it up nicely: “An ingenious word for an invaluable concept—Steven Pinker.” Barker is by his own account not “a professional philosopher or scientist,” and he does not claim to be a comedian or a cartoonist. But he has, especially with this …

While the U.S. Constitution makes no mention of political parties, the Framers wrote it with parties in mind. In Federalist X—Madison’s classic defense of the Constitution—he wrote: “Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of factions.” …

Conservatism, in my earlier years, was the stale-coffee political appropriation of trigger phrases such as “family values” and “what would Jesus do?” In Shakespearean peripeteia, I found my university experience to have set me up closer with it. It is no longer odd to me that secular humanists can find themselves flirting with mainstream conservatism. …