Not Surprisingly They Can’t Take the Joke — In a scene early in Old Dads, Jack (Bill Burr’s character) is driving when a teenage kid in an electric scooter swerves in front of him, taking up the whole road. Jack honks and curses. As the kid escapes through an intersection, Jack stops to scream out the window, “Where…

Many of my students are Catholic, so when I introduce them to Abrahamic theology in my philosophy classes the reactions are predictable. Some speak of Biblical stories like Adam and Eve as though they really happened, others have trouble understanding that God could be defined as anything other than an…

Jonathan Blow’s The Witness is one of my favorite video games of all time for many reasons, from the sophistication of the puzzles to the beautiful environments to the windmill videos. I wrote an article about what I took to be Blow’s epistemology when making the game, and I was…

I’m one of those people that many on the political left love to hate: although I claim to be progressive (and my voting and charity record prove it), I am not fully woke. While I concur wholeheartedly with the lofty goal of inclusiveness, I don’t agree with many woke tactics…

I’ve seen it so many times: an ardent church-goer who encounters philosophy and comes away with the impression that the age-old discipline is just “mind games and tricks”. …

If you ever have a political discussion with a group of leftists, one topic that is sure to elicit a chorus of mockery and belly laughs is the intelligence level of those on the right. They voted for Trump because they’re stupid! Don’t they understand that they’re voting against their…

Not too long ago Neil deGrasse Tyson appeared on Coleman Hughes’ podcast to discuss policing and racism. When Hughes, a philosopher with a penchant for data, began to present statistics, Tyson was unimpressed. Referencing George Floyd, Tyson argued that such brutality should never happen at all and the fact that…

For a while I’ve been nursing the idea of writing something on meditation misunderstandings — be it a blog or a book — since many people I know or whose work I have read have similar misunderstandings that crop up again and again (I’m looking at you, John Horgan, here…

How the unspoken rule of higher education impedes effective teaching and learning — Earlier this year, two students at my alma mater, the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), unsuccessfully tried to ban a longstanding class on the films of Woody Allen. …