After reading and writing about two books that include lengthy discussions of the origins of religion—E. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of the Earth for The New Criterion and Oliver Sacks’ ...

For the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity—promising transcendence and community, but failing to deliver.

Perception and transcendence. In The Visible and the Invisible, his final and unfinished work, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed his earlier phenomenology of sense perception into ...

As America's attitudes toward religion have continued to shift, it was perhaps inevitable that Americans would now worship at the altar of work instead. There's a word for seeking such validation ...

Or if you have a distant memory of a religious practice—perhaps from your youth—you might just slip into a service and sit in the back, observing without judgment or expectation. 2. Read more.

For some, however, worldly concerns don’t satisfy their religious appetites and longing for transcendence. Religious passion can be a powerful force of good, but only when anchored in reality ...

The piety of his early religious faith, divested but never fully dismissed, supplied Heaney with the first belief in the possibility, even the necessity, of such a transcendence. More: Poetry ...