Woody Allen and the Secret to Lasting Joy

The great 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard spoke of three stages that one passes through on the way to spiritual maturity: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. During the aesthetic stage, a person is preoccupied with sensual pleasure, with the satisfaction of bodily desire. Food, drink, sex, comfort, and artistic beauty are the dominating concerns of this stage of life. The ordinary fellow drinking beer at the baseball game and the effete aristocrat sipping wine in... Read More

How Do Atheists Define Love?

All my atheist friends and family members believe in “love.” But what is love? Here’s a question: If humans have no soul, and are merely evolutionary advanced animals, is ‘love’ anything more than instinct or hormones? In a letter to his ten-year-old daughter, atheist Richard Dawkins explained the importance of evidence in science and in life: "People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves... Read More

What Is the Soul?

"For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man..." — Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins Last year, I found myself unexpectedly marveling at an album by Tom “It's Not Unusual” Jones, which featured covers of songs by Tom Waits, Paul Simon, and The Low Anthem. One track, "Soul of a Man," revived a bluesy 1930 song by Blind Willie Johnson that asks one my favorite philosophical... Read More

How to Find Happiness

We all want to be happy. Every day, in whatever we do, we seek this goal — one that we share with every other person on the planet. But what exactly is happiness? And how can we find it? To discover the answer to these questions, Sonja Lyubomirsky, in her book The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want (Penguin, 2007), examines hundreds of empirical studies. She writes, “Studies show that 50 percent of individual differences in happiness are determined... Read More

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