Entries for June 2007

David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, is perhaps most widely known for having survived one of "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski's 16 attempts at postal assassination—a twisted neo-Luddite campaign that ended up killing three people and wounding 23. Suffering permanent damage to his right hand and right eye, Gelernter directed much of his understandable rage into a furious screed of a book, Drawing Life. In it, he argued that the Unabomber's actions were symptomatic of the moral decay produced by America's feckless liberal elites.

If that book was Gelernter's vision of post-'60s fallen America, Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion is his hymn to an idealism that he thinks not only ennobles Americans at their finest but also constitutes a religion that attracts and inspires people around the world.

Much journalistic ink has been devoted to the issue of Mitt Romney and his Mormon faith. At first, the big question was whether his religion was hurtful to the former Massachusetts governor's chances of winning the Republican nomination for the presidency. More recently, though, almost as much attention has been focused on whether Romney's campaign might be damaging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormon faith is officially called.

Valuable three-century-old documents written by Sir Isaac Newton and owned by a Jewish scholar and collector since 1936 have been put on display in Jerusalem. They reportedly shed light on the less known religious side of the famous English thinker. But do they, in fact, do so?

Freelance journalist Gordy Slack has written the first book-length treatment of the trial that caught the nation's attention during the summer of 2005, The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design, and a School Board in Dover, Pa.

The New Republic recently published Paul Berman's excellent intellectual portrait of the Swiss-born Islamic thinker Tariq Ramadan, arguably the most influential Muslim writing and teaching in Europe today. In what must be the longest single essay ever published in that magazine, Berman, a writer in residence at New York University, not only tells us what has been said about this controversial figure; he also goes to the trouble, rare among those who either celebrate or revile Ramadan, of reading his work closely.

Call Deepak Chopra a "new age guru," and he bristles. To his mind, the label belittles a serious, career-long effort to combine western scientific knowledge with eastern spiritual wisdom in a comprehensive approach to health and healing. A hugely successful one-man industry with his own California-based Chopra Center for Wellbeing, a nonstop lecture tour, and a weekly radio program, the Indian-born physician (internal medicine and endocrinology) has also made time for 49 books. The most recent, Buddha, is a fictionalized version of the early life of the great spiritual leader (563?-483? B.C.), taking the northern Indian prince Siddhartha from his cloistered palace upbringing through his years as a monk and seeker to his transformative enlightenment.