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Philosophy & Religion | The New York Review of Books

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Philosophy & Religion

Questioning Desire

Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex is rare in its ability to speak to a plural audience—queer and straight, multiracial and multigendered—with the assumption that we have some common interests in sex and dating even if we have varied experiences of them.

September 22, 2022 issue

Gregory Hays

The Last Reversal

Two books consider the stories we’ve told ourselves over thousands of years about the way the world ends.

August 18, 2022 issue

Apropos of Nothing

Nonbeing belongs to that category of concepts that seem self-evident and self-explanatory, but have been objects of deepest perplexity for philosophers.

July 21, 2022 issue

Peter E. Gordon

In Search of Recognition

The philosopher Axel Honneth argues that the act of recognizing one another forms the scaffolding of our personal and social world.

June 23, 2022 issue

Christopher Benfey

The Hum of Humanity

The autobiographical turn in Stanley Cavell’s later work illuminates his extraordinarily varied philosophical interests.

May 12, 2022 issue

Sue Halpern

Before the Fall

As evangelicals came into the GOP tent, Republican voters and politicians traded women’s bodies for political power.

May 11, 2022

Walker Mimms

At Saul Steinberg’s Table

The artist known for his playful, philosophical drawings also had a rich practice in sculpture, fashioning everyday objects in wood and paint.

April 27, 2022

Garry Wills

‘Don’t Call Me a Saint’

In her lifetime, Dorothy Day rejected canonization for herself. Now revived, this bad idea would only diminish the great founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

January 26, 2022

The Latest

John Banville

‘A God Can Do It’

For Rilke, the artist’s task is to absorb the realm of things and thereby transform it into something rich and strange.

November 3, 2022 issue

Kathryn Hughes

Department of Speculation

A new book on the history of a group of British clairvoyants charged with predicting disasters maintains a scrupulous neutrality as to whether these precognitions were coincidences or supernatural happenings.

November 3, 2022 issue

Christopher Benfey

Emerson & His ‘Big Brethren’

“‘You are yourself a sequoia,’ John Muir told Emerson during the philosopher’s trip to California in 1871. ‘Stop and get acquainted with your big brethren.’”

October 20, 2022 issue

Tim Parks

The Pope’s Many Silences

A new account of Pius XII’s actions during World War II gives the impression of a pope who lacked any clear moral or political vision and made every decision on the basis of the merest expediency.

October 20, 2022 issue

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Symphilosophizing in Jena

The intellectual achievements of the early German Romantics were inseparable from their friendships and feuds.

October 20, 2022 issue

Malise Ruthven

The Long Reach of the Satanic Verses

The violent controversy over Salman Rushdie’s novel can be traced back to the early days of Islam.

September 25, 2022

David S. Reynolds

Throngs of Unseen People

In the Houses of Their Dead, Terry Alford’s history of spiritualism during the Civil War era, suggests an unexpected link between the Lincoln family and that of John Wilkes Booth.

October 6, 2022 issue

Brenda Wineapple

New England Ecstasies

The transcendentalists thought all human inspiration was divine, all nature a miracle.

March 10, 2022 issue

Seyla Benhabib

Thinking Without Banisters

Hannah Arendt’s reflections on judgment, thinking, moral action, and political courage show that she was not a system builder and was not interested in offering axioms by which to rearrange the world. Yet in following her train of thought, we experience the illuminating force of her insights.

February 24, 2022 issue

Lis Harris

Strangers in a Strange Land

Two recent books investigate the canny mastery of housing politics that has allowed the Hasidic Satmar sect to build thriving, isolated communities in Brooklyn and upstate New York.

February 24, 2022 issue