The Global Spiral  is an e-publication of Metanexus Institute. Through articles, essays, book reviews, and news, the Global Spiral  explores humanity's most profound questions and challenges.
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 Around the Web

Metanexus staff picks from the World Wide Web

March 18, 2010
Re-Storying the World
We are indebted to indigenous philosophies at least as much as we are to modern environmental philosophies, maybe even more.


March 18, 2010
Good Habits
In Character asks: What can cloistered nuns teach us about humility?


March 17, 2010
Are Animals People?
The disparity between experiments that suggest sophisticated cognition in animals and those that find hard limits to animal intelligence has created a debate over animal “personhood.”


March 17, 2010
How I Found God and Peace with my Atheist Brother
Why Peter Hitchens believes and Christopher doesn't.


March 16, 2010
Avatar and the Flight from Reality
The New Atlantis on why James Cameron’s Avatar is both anti-nature and anti-art.


March 16, 2010
The Moon is Elsewhere
The presence—or absence—of the gods can make a Hindu out of even the most secular.


March 16, 2010
Anybody Home?
A review of Paul Davies’ new book, The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone in the Universe?


March 12, 2010
Putting Secularism Out of its Misery
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/spengler/2009/08/29/putting-secularism-out-of-its-misery/


March 12, 2010
Spiritual but not Religious?
Making the case for moving beyond your own personal God.


March 12, 2010
Jesus, Jobs and Justice
"[...B]lack women have remained the most faithful and abiding servants of the church, and they have been among the most diligent and effective activists for racial justice."


March 11, 2010
Survival of the Disciplines
Why are some departments being eliminated and others are secure?


March 11, 2010
What's the Good of the "Examined Life"?
Some Thoughts on the Apology and Liberal Education


March 10, 2010
The Myth Of Time Travel
Raymond Tallis, in Philosophy Now, time travels merely by the power of thought.


March 10, 2010
Philosophers Rip Darwin
Michael Ruse writes in The Chronicle about what Darwin doubters get wrong.


March 10, 2010
More than Mayhem
The Times Higher Ed reports on the rebirth of anarchism as a scholarly subject.


March 05, 2010
Postmillennial Tension: An Essay
"The end of history has reached its end.  Can we be the ones we've been waiting for?"


March 05, 2010
Why My 50,000 Videogames are the Art Form of the Future?
Far from endangering the soul, immersion in the world of avatars can give us a glimpse of lost innocence.


March 04, 2010
Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force
"[...C]ulture was thought to have blunted the rate of human evolution, or even brought it to a halt, in the distant past. Many biologists are now seeing the role of culture in a quite different light. "


March 04, 2010
Turning Peer-Review into Modern-Day Holy Scripture
The treatment of peer-reviewed science as an unquestionable form of authority is corrupting the peer-review system and damaging public debate.


March 04, 2010
And God Created Football
Intimations of the divine in a well-executed screen pass.


March 04, 2010
Teresa of Avila
A woman of her time, a saint for ours.


March 04, 2010
Bleak, Shallow and Repetitive
From AdBusters: Virtual life seems increasingly less worth living.


March 02, 2010
A Loving Levinas on War
The heart of Levinas’s philosophy was to discern a spark of the divine in the face of the ‘other.’


March 01, 2010
Apes or Angels?
Margaret Somerville on why the origin of ethics matters.


March 01, 2010
What Knowledge is Necessary for Virtue?
Critics of Aristotelianism contend that it demands of a person too much in the way of knowledge to be credible. However, some forms of knowledge are more important than others.


February 26, 2010
Chris Hedges: Zero Point of Systemic Collapse
“A society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, commits collective suicide”


February 26, 2010
Quite as a Basic Human Right
Silence is the enemy of everything superficial, stupid, and ugly.


February 26, 2010
Abstract Science?
Abstraction, not just mathematics, has its place in science as it does in art


February 26, 2010
Quark Soup
Physicists create conditions not seen since the big bang.


February 25, 2010
Unraveling How Nature Works
In the last two decades, network theory has emerged as a way of making sense of everything from the World Wide Web to the human brain.


February 25, 2010
Do the Faculty Shootings in Alabama Say Something About Academic Culture?
Chronicle readers react to the Huntsville tragedy.


February 24, 2010
Reason and the Modern Cultural Horizon
Has Reason become an ideology? What cultural paradigms might provide an antidote to the tyranny of modern rationalism?


February 24, 2010
The Challenge Facing Theology
A review of Michael Allen Gillespie's, The Theological Origins of Modernity.


February 24, 2010
God, These People Annoy Me
Chris Satullo on NPR: "The last time we mixed faith in reason and politics, we got Pol Pot. And the Cultural Revolution. And the Gulag."


February 24, 2010
Are There Secular Reasons?
Stanley Fish in the NY Times says Enlightenment philosophy backs itself into a "cul de sac" when it eschews metaphysical foundations.


February 19, 2010
Postmodern Man
The second generation is here, and boy does it feel right.


February 19, 2010
New Monasticism, also Known as Ordinary Life in the Neighbourhood
"At my first glance at the new monasticism I...was appalled and thought, 'here is power and privilege, overhauled.'"


February 19, 2010
Jesus Loves Me, and My Image of Him
"Jesus was an end-times preacher who offered up some radical, compelling shit."


February 18, 2010
The Ethical Dog
Looking for the roots of human morality in the animal kingdom? Focus on canines, who know how to play fair.


February 17, 2010
Lenten Detox
Commonweal offers a reflection for the beginning of Lent, the soberest of liturgical seasons.


February 17, 2010
Could Our World Be a Giant Hologram?
And could this explain how how space-time emerges out of quantum theory?


February 17, 2010
Is Australia Losing Its Religion?
Sure they gave us Mel Gibson's brand of Catholicism, but were Australians ever really that religious to begin with?


TRL
Spirital Capital
Templeton Advanced Research Program
Spiritual Transformation Scientific Research Program