Christians can have neutral supernatural beings

23 Sunday Aug 2026

Posted by in Deity, Morality, Place, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Supernatural

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Back when I was a TA at Harvard, possibly my favourite student was an evangelical Christian. He was an economist, so his written work wasn’t as good as some of his other students, but his participation was essential to my seminar discussion, within Diana Eck‘s world-religions class. Many of the students were at Harvard Divinity School and drawn to a view that the “world religions” were all basically the same and all basically good. This student was having none of it: to claims that Christians and Muslims worship the same god, he would insist “Either God had a son or he didn’t! That makes a difference!” The discussion was far richer for that counter-perspective.

We remained in touch for a little while afterwards; he even interviewed me for an evangelism class. He went off to do missionary work in Brazil, and was struck by the role that folklore creatures like shapeshifting spirits play in local lives. “They may not be real in the US,” he said, “but they’re real here.”

What really sticks in my mind about that conversation, though, was what came next. He thought that if the locals were to become Christian, they would need to stop making offerings to the spirits. After all, the Christian God admits no competition, no idolatry, no “other gods before me”. But, I asked my former student, would offerings to spirits necessarily be idolatry? What if the interactions weren’t worship, but transactional? In many cultures, one leaves offerings to spirit beings in the hope that they will provide some sort of good fortune in return. That doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with worship. If one pays a doctor or a mechanic, that’s not idolatry, it’s just fee for service. Why would it be any different to pay a faerie or a river spirit?

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Marx and Mill: similar makers of the modern left

16 Sunday Aug 2026

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Economics, Flourishing, German Tradition, Place, Politics

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Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill have both done a great deal to shape modern political philosophy. Their differences stand out fairly easily: Mill the analytical English-language utilitarian enthusiast of capitalist progress, Marx the “continental” dialectical advocate of communist revolution. Yet what stands out to me is what they have in common.

Maybe their commonalities stand out to me because they’re the first two philosophers I ever seriously engaged with myself, back in high school. As I sought a deeper justification for my own activist political views, Mill’s Utilitarianism was the first primary philosophical text I ever read. And my father’s Marxism spurred me to do a paper on Marxism in a high-school economics class, for a teacher who was somewhat bewildered by it. Possibly as a result, both thinkers have shaped my own political philosophy considerably – though I have my disagreements with both. But in both my agreements and disagreements, I find their similarities more important than their differences.

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The Radical Buddhism Project

06 Thursday Aug 2026

Posted by in Modernized Buddhism, Politics

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My friend and colleague James Shields has just started a new site called the Radical Buddhism Project, “an independent digital humanities archive and research portal dedicated to recovering, preserving, and contextualizing the historical intersections of Buddhist doctrine with radical left-wing socio-political thought.” It collects information on Buddhist radicals in countries across Asia.

I’ve often been at pains to point out that classical Buddhism often opposed political engagement. (Others like Brian Victoria and Michael Jerryson have called attention to something that should have been obvious, that Buddhism has frequently been deployed in a right-wing direction as well.) That said, traditions flourish by being reinvented and extended in new ways, from Chinese Tiantai to medical mindfulness. I think the radical Buddhists on the site are creating an interesting form of modernized Buddhism that’s worth knowing about, and I’m excited that James has put the site together.

The present moment has no marshmallow

02 Sunday Aug 2026

Posted by in Action, Attachment and Craving, Food, Mahāyāna, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Pleasure, Psychology, Self, Self-Discipline

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Last year the Zen philosopher Seth Zuihō Segall invited me to speak to a course on seven universal virtues, on the topic of self-discipline or temperance. I want to return here to the point that I think was most important in that talk: there’s an apparent contradiction between the virtues of self-discipline and mindfulness (at least in the modern form of mindfulness) – but it is only apparent.

Specifically: self-discipline is all about delaying gratification – focusing on a future benefit that makes it worth avoiding the thing that seems appealing in the present. Whereas mindfulness – at least in its modern forms, which have more historic precedent than is sometimes supposed – is all about a focus on the present moment, letting the past and the future fall away. Aren’t these two supposed virtues then in contradiction with each other: the one telling you to focus on the future over the present, the other telling you to focus on the present over the future?

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The gap is not glorious

26 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by in Daoism, Death, Deity, Early and Theravāda, Economics, Flourishing, Metaphysics, Mindfulness, Politics

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The Buddha’s encounter with unwelcome facts of life. Picture from Wat Preah Prom Rath, Siem Reap, Cambodia: Adobe Stock image copyright by Godong Photo.

The great Buddhist poet Aśvaghoṣa famously tells the story of the Buddha’s father, the king, who tried to keep his son as an heir rather than a monk by isolating him from all the bad things in the world. Of course the king’s plan doesn’t work: the Buddha-to-be sneaks out and sees an old man, a sick man and a dead man, reminding him that these fates will come to a king as surely as anyone else, and so he renounces the world and becomes a monk. The story shows us that there always remains a gap between what is and what should be: we will always face sad facts like illness and death. That gap is bad, it is always with us, and that is unfortunate; it is just the way things are, whether we like it or not. It provides a need and an impetus for us to improve our minds, to escape the suffering that comes from craving in the face of those sad facts.

A very different take on that gap comes from Jacobin senior editor Alex Caring-Lobel in the Springer Handbook of Mindfulness, which collects over thirty essays objecting to the modern mindfulness movemennt. These essays take particular objection to David Gelles’s claim that “stress emanates from a mismatch between our expectation of how things should be and the way things are”. (p85) Caring-Lobel, in particular, objects to Gelles’s view because it

dismisses that glorious gap between “how things should be and the way there [sic] are” as a kind of impediment to flourishing. This is, after all, the space of the social imagination. It is also the space in which democracy operates. (Caring-Lobel p209)

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Announcing my book: After Anger

19 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by in Anger, Buddhism, Flourishing, Mahāyāna, Mindfulness, Patient Endurance, Serenity

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Readers, I’m delighted to announce that my first book is officially scheduled for publication! It’ll come out in November but you can preorder it now, and I would really like to encourage you to do so if you’re interested: preorder numbers encourage bookstores to order more copies, which will help the book do well. I am particularly delighted that the book is coming out with Shambhala Publications – the esteemed Buddhist publisher of Ken Wilber, whose work has inspired a ton of this blog’s reflection, and Pema Chödrön, whom I’ve increasingly found a powerful source of wisdom.

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On being from Canada (and not India)

12 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by in Indigenous American Thought, Modern Hinduism, Place, Politics

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Stan Rogers. Picture taken originally from Toronto.com, used under fair use.

The great Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers – taken from us far too soon at a mere 33 – has inspired me in many ways. I first encountered him through his modern (and very Canadian) sea chantey “Barrett’s Privateers“, a staple of folk singers at pub nights for drunken Canadian undergraduates like myself (and which has more American admirers than you’d think). The joy of singing along to that song was part of what led me to join McGill’s Folk Music Society club, and eventually become its president for a year. It wasn’t long after that that I had my life-changing Buddhist epiphany in Thailand – yet even there, Rogers’s “Mary Ellen Carter” played a major role. His “The Idiot” was a great comfort at the times I expected a tenure-track job would leave me in a long-distance relationship from the woman I loved on the East Coast. When I married her, “Forty-Five Years” was the last dance at our wedding.

Lately, though, there’s a much lesser known song of his that has been going through my mind repeatedly. It is the closing song of From Fresh Water, his posthumous 1984 album about Ontario – where, despite his well known ties to the Maritime provinces, Rogers (like me) was born and raised. This song is called “The House of Orange”.

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Against nostalgic ecology

28 Sunday Jun 2026

Posted by in Biology, Politics, Serenity

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When we think about the natural environment and how to treat it, we often assume by default that what we’re trying to do is return the nonhuman world to where it was before we started seriously messing with it. That impulse is very understandable. The world’s ecosystems functioned better, in the way that they had evolved to do and a way that was helpful to us, before we started clear-cut logging and making vast pits full of plastic waste and so on. It would be great if we could get the natural world back to where it was in 1800.

The problem is we can’t do that. Extinction is forever, as they say – with a very significant exception that I’ll get to. The garbage dumps are there; we have no way of turning all the plastic in them into something not-plastic. As Alan Weisman vividly reminds us in The World Without Us, if humans were to disappear entirely from the planet tomorrow, our products – from ceramics to radioactive waste – would remain for millions of years. We can certainly take steps to diminish the impact of our future actions, but the effects of our past actions are going to remain with us. The natural world, now and in the future, is the natural world impacted by our actions.

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You still have to naturalize karma

21 Sunday Jun 2026

Posted by in Consciousness, Death, Flourishing, Karma, Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Philosophy of Science, Psychology, Supernatural

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Karin Meyers’s work on the “damned topics” of Buddhist philosophy is most powerful on the topic of rebirth. Because that’s the place where there’s actually some reasonably powerful evidence for the “damned topic”. Where I think she goes too far with that evidence is in the title of her unpublished paper on the topic, which is “Against naturalizing Buddhism”. I think we need to naturalize – that is, to put in non-supernatural terms – one of Buddhism’s most important ideas, namely karma. And I think we need to do that even if the evidence convinces us that rebirth is real.

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On the damned topics of Buddhist philosophy

14 Sunday Jun 2026

Posted by in Death, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Supernatural

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American University philosopher Karin Meyers made an important contribution to Buddhist philosophical studies with her 2016 essay “The damned topics of Buddhist philosophy“. The essay (available free online) has never been formally published, though it clearly deserves to be: when I met Meyers recently, she noted that people have already discussed and commented on it more than any other piece she ever wrote. While I disagree with Meyers’s substantive conclusions, I think she takes an often methodologically wrong-headed field and points it in the right direction.

Meyers calls “damned” those Buddhist topics that would typically be called “supernatural” (a term that she dislikes but I have no problem with myself). That is, “topics such as rebirth, karma, non-human beings and realms, siddhis, devotional and contemplative practices, and even aspects of Buddhist soteriology.” And she claims:

Although such topics are described and analyzed by textual historians and anthropologists, they tend to be avoided or dismissed by philosophers. This is not because they are inherently immune to rational scrutiny or lack philosophical relevance. Instead, I suspect it is because of an implicit and often unacknowledged allegiance to certain modernist assumptions—namely, physicalism and epistemologies that privilege a cognicentric empiricism restricted to the five senses, as well as rationalistic and disembodied ways of knowing. Basic Buddhist doctrines and traditional forms of Buddhism directly challenge these assumptions.

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