People may join churches and temples and mosques and announce sectarian identities, but when it comes to the fine points of belief, it can sometimes seem that each of us is a sect of one. Every church has areas of permissible differences, then. Sometimes these can be cast as distinctions of emphasis, and, when they come with constituencies, they

if, as many Muslims believe, the Quran is untranslatable, its value must lie in something more than the doctrines it contains.

Amartya Sen, the great Indian economist and philosopher, once told me how, as a child, he went to ask his grandfather about Hinduism. You’re too young, he was told, come back when you’re older. So he came back as a teenager to try again. But he had to begin by warning his grandfather that he had decided in the interim that he didn’t believe in the

The trouble is that we’ve tended to emphasize the details of belief over the shared practices and the moral communities that buttress religious life. Our English word “orthodoxy” comes from a Greek word that means “correct belief.” But there’s a less familiar word, “orthopraxy,” that comes from another Greek word, πρᾶξις (praxis), which means

Every religion can be said to have three dimensions. Sure, there is a body of belief. But there’s also what you do—call that practice. And then there’s who you do it with—call that community, or fellowship.

Did he find four separating forces between his temporary guest and him? Name, age, race, creed. . . . What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom and about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen? He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew

however much identity bedevils us, we cannot do without it. You’ll recall the old joke. A man goes to see a psychiatrist.

Evolutionary psychologists think these tendencies were once adaptive; they helped people survive by creating groups they could rely on to deal with the hazards of prehistoric life, including the existence of other groups competing for resources. Something like that is probably right. But whatever the explanation, it seems pretty clear that we’re

Labels came first, then, but essences followed fast. The boys didn’t develop opposing identities because they had different norms; they developed different norms because they had opposing identities. As far as identity goes, it turns out a lot can happen in four days.