The Humanitas Forum

Friendship, like family and community, has fallen on hard times in our modern world.  Mobility, busyness, digital technology and numerous other factors have contributed to the thinning—if not the disappearance—of “true friendship.”  Friendship has become “the characteristically modern …

Few books reward close reading—and rereading and reading yet again—as richly as does C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves.  Each of the “four loves”—affection, friendship, Eros, and charity—has fallen on hard times in our modern world, something Lewis …

The moment has arrived!  It is no longer easy to be a faithful Christian witness.  The operative words here are, of course, “faithful” and “witness.”  To be faithful is to be true to the truths of Christianity.…

David Brooks has been described as a “cultural Jew.”  But it would be a mistake to think that this New York Times columnist is just another secular journalist.  In articles, speeches, interviews and a recent book, Brooks describes …

It is predictable!  When the Pew Research Center releases a new poll on religion in America, gallons of virtual ink are spilled attempting to interpret the new data.  The assessments and the headlines vary considerably, sometimes wildly.  …

Pure and simple, the future is the great unknown.  But the Pew Research Center’s “The Future of World Religions” should be taken seriously—given the massive amount of research that went into the report.  In sum, religion is not …

Atheism is “truly Good News.”  As such, it “should not be hidden under a bushel.”  This is only one of the endorsements for Peter Boghossian’s guide to “talking people out of their faith,” A Manual for Creating Atheists…

Traffic jams and overloaded brains are the products of modern life.  And they are similar in significant ways.  Traffic slows when there are too many automobiles on a roadway, producing irritated drivers and causing accidents. Brain overload also …

“What does it mean to be human?” is perhaps the most significant question of the 21^st century.  Or, asked a bit differently in anticipation of what we might anticipate in what’s called the biotech century, “What is the …

Bill Gates is concerned.  Stephen Hawking is worried.  And Elon Musk warns that artificial intelligence is the “greatest existential threat” facing humankind—“with artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.”  

Sir Clive Sinclair goes even further:  …