James Talarico’s victory is personal

08 Sunday Nov 2026

Posted by in Christianity, Deity, Economics, Place, Politics, Protestantism

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For educated Americans, Tuesday’s election was a great sigh of relief. The wheels are coming off the clown car; the American legislature will no longer be giving a demented fascist everything he wants. Americans can turn to the understandably furious Canadians and say: that is not who we are. Over and over, candidates ran against the tariffs and won.

For me, it’s the victories in Texas that are personal. I kept hearing people say “we don’t believe the polls, Texas can’t possibly go Democratic”, and I thought: that’s not my Texas. I lived in Texas for only a year, but I loved it then and still do – and I am a brown-skinned gender-fluid immigrant socialist. My Texas is the Austin costume shop with a wide variety of stiletto heels in men’s sizes. It’s the parade of girls in resplendent dresses getting their quinceañera pictures taken in the Dallas botanical gardens on a typical Sunday. It’s the miles of shops selling saris and barfi in the suburbs of Houston. It’s the old Spanish canals of downtown San Antonio, built before there was a United States. It’s the local chain supermarket selling dozens of kinds of dried chiles in bulk. It’s the Burning Man-inspired Meow Wolf immersive art exhibitions outside Dallas and Houston. It’s the Rio Grande Valley where 90% of the people are of Mexican origin. It’s Ethiopian barbecue fusion in a Dallas suburb. And this week, after a drought of more than thirty years, my Texas finally won at politics.

I’m proud of Gina Hinojosa, finally giving a Mexican-origin governor to a state where less than half the residents are white. I’m delighted that the state house and other statewide offices went Democratic too. But I’m absolutely tickled by the young senator-elect, James Talarico.

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Paths of Practice interview

01 Sunday Nov 2026

Posted by in Aesthetics, Anger, Attachment and Craving, Daoism, Faith, Health, Karmic Redirection, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Practice, Prayer, Psychology, Serenity

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Podcaster and Sōtō Zen practitioner Vincent Moore invited me this week to be interviewed on his Buddhist podcast Paths of Practice. Naturally we talk a lot about my upcoming book, and I think the interview gives you a great taster of what’s in the book, but we cover a lot of other ground. Especially, it’s a very personal interview, covering topics like how I first got into Śāntideva, my daily Buddhist practice, my unintentional digital detox in 2005, and the time I decided not to listen to Nine Inch Nails. You can watch it below or at its original location on YouTube.

The tragedy of Johannes Kepler

25 Sunday Oct 2026

Posted by in Aesthetics, Deity, German Tradition, Metaphysics, Physics and Astronomy, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism

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The early 17th century, the time of Galileo, was a golden age for astronomy. One of its leading figures was the German Johannes Kepler, who made successful mathematical models of the planets’ orbit around the sun. Kepler also reacted strongly against something we now take for granted: the idea that the universe is infinite, with many solar systems rather than everything orbitting the sun. Kepler thought that the evidence didn’t support an infinite universe, and he was very grateful for that. For when Kepler thought of an infinite universe he said:

This very cogitation carries with it I don’t know what secret, hidden horror; indeed one finds oneself wandering in this immensity, to which are denied limits and center and therefore also all determinate places. (from De stella nova)

And here’s the thing: Kepler was right to be horrified.

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The significance of General Tso’s chicken (and pizza)

18 Sunday Oct 2026

Posted by in Food, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism

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Photo by Evan Joshua Swigart (TheCulinaryGeek), CC-BY 2.0 licence.

For longer than I’ve been alive, restaurants in North America that call themselves “Chinese” have typically served dishes that would not be recognized in China: chop suey, sweet and sour pork. This North American Chinese food is not one of my favourite cuisines, but I am fond of one of its unhealthier highlights: General Tso’s chicken, chicken deep-fried to a crisp then covered in a sweet and spicy sauce.

In the past two decades there have been a number of essays and articles explaining the history of General Tso’s chicken: how it began with a Hunan-American chef who wanted to make a new dish reminiscent of Hunan court cuisine, which had neither the crisp batter nor the sauce’s sweetness, but then quickly got taken up by other American chefs into something that delighted the American public and became taken up as a typically Hunan dish even though it was nothing of the sort. Perhaps most strikingly, according to one such article, “General Tso’s chicken is now being adopted as a ‘traditional’ dish by some influential chefs and food writers in Hunan”: some people back in Hunan now claim the dish as theirs.

And what this all reminds me of is a significant metaphor used in the study of Indian religions.

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Why I miss postmodernism

04 Sunday Oct 2026

Posted by in French Tradition, Health, Morality, Politics, Sex

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I never imagined I’d say this, but I miss postmodernism.

I was a foe of postmodernism back when it was still at the centre of intellectual life, and my criticisms of it – for its self-contradictory relativism as well as its political self-undermining – still stand. Yet for all those flaws, I sometimes find myself pining for the days when postmodernism ruled the intellectual roost.

Postmodernism was terrible at achieving political change – in contrast to the Social Justice movement, which did make valuable change around gender (even as it failed around race). But sometimes political change isn’t the most important thing.

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Social Justice against postmodernism

27 Sunday Sep 2026

Posted by in Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, French Tradition, Politics, Truth

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Remember postmodernism? When I was a student in the 1990s and 2000s, the very French philosophies of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida were all the intellectual rage. Everything was about subverting established paradigms and ways of thinking, showing complexity in things that seemed to be simple. In the early years of Love of All Wisdom – around 2010 – it was still influential enough that I often wrote critiques of postmodernism, especially about how it stood in the way of political change.

Much like the standpoint theory that animates the Social Justice movement, postmodernism was most popular and developed within left-wing academic humanities departments, and it was also skeptical of traditional liberal ideals like free speech. For that reason, many commentators, left and right, see the Social Justice movement as having its own roots in postmodernism. But this is a mistake.

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Is delusion a modern institution?

20 Sunday Sep 2026

Posted by in Biology, Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Social Science, Supernatural

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My upcoming book is devoted to the theme that suffering doesn’t come primarily from bad external situations (like political ones), but from the interaction of those bad situations with our mental states of craving and resistance. One might ask: is it possible to split the difference? Could it be that our suffering comes from our mental states but that the institutions make things worse?

Mindfulness critic Ron Purser and Zen teacher David Loy think so. Referring to the traditional “three poisons” of craving (rāga), anger (dosa) and delusion (moha), they claim:

today the three unwholesome motivations that Buddhism highlights—greed, ill will, and delusion—are no longer confined to individual minds, but have become institutionalized into forces beyond personal control.

The emphases are mine, to show what a strong claim is being made here: that our institutions today encourage craving, anger, and delusion in a way that previous societies and institutions did not. Once the problems were confined to individual minds, but they no longer are. Purser and Loy don’t explain their claim in that post, but Loy did so in an important 2004 piece called “What’s Buddhist about socially engaged Buddhism”, no longer available at its original site but thankfully still available through the wonders of archive.org.

I examine Loy’s arguments about institutions encouraging craving and anger in the book. (Overall I don’t think they work, though he’s got more of a case on craving than on anger.) But Loy’s claims about delusion take us far enough afield from the book’s argument that I abbreviated the book’s response to them. Here, I can now give that response in full. Is it true that delusion is “no longer confined to individual minds”, but has become “institutionalized into forces beyond personal control”?

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Do stop thinking about tomorrow

13 Sunday Sep 2026

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Epicureanism, Fear, Food, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Phenomenology, Pleasure, Work

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Modern mindfulness meditation is helpful in a great variety of ways. Most importantly, it trains you to notice when your mind is distracted. Once you’ve done it for a while, the benefits go further. Especially, you can notice how your mind is distracted.

Some of Andy Puddicombe’s more advanced Headspace meditation series ask you to notice the kinds of distractions your mind faces: starting with whether it’s a thought or a feeling, and then examining the kind of thought or feeling it is. Once you’ve done this enough, you start to notice patterns: what it is that your mind tends to do in the moment. In my case, I noticed that my mind returns over and over to future plans.

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A Woke 2 that’s not a mistake?

30 Sunday Aug 2026

Posted by in Politics, Social Science

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Official portrait of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by Franmarie Metzler. Public domain.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”), the charismatic socialist Puerto Rican-American New York representative, made headlines last week for her quip that “Woke 1 was a mistake.” From a career perspective, this was a canny and savvy political move from someone who is, on the one hand, viewed as a major contender for 2028 president, and on the other, perceived as closely linked to the Social Justice movement, also known as “woke”.

But my concerns here aren’t with the prospects of possible American presidential candidates. Rather, they’re with what this claim says about the politics of race and gender in 2026 – in the US for sure, but also around the world, since the impact of the Social Justice movement was global.

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