Sublime

“I have a view that is uncommon among social scientists, which is that moral revolutions are real and they change our culture,” Robert Putnam told me. In the early 20th century, a group of liberal Christians, including the pastor Walter Rauschenbusch, urged other Christians to expand their faith from a narrow concern for personal salvation to a... See more

A religion of emotive intuition, of aestheticized and commodified experience, of self-creation and self-improvement and, yes, selfies. A religion for a new generation of Americans raised to think of themselves both as capitalist consumers and as content creators. A religion decoupled from institutions, from creeds, from metaphysical truth-claims

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I switched my major to psychology, but not before taking a class where we read Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

That book shaped my view of God for the next 20 years of my life. Durkheim essentially argues that what people worship as God, whether they’re Aboriginal people in Australia or Catholic people in Europe or Muslim... See more