What is fascia and why does it matter? ... When fascia malfunctions ... What David does as a “body worker” ... How body posture could influence mental health ... Unanswered questions in fascia research ... Can mindfulness meditation reduce the perception of pain? ... The concept of “tensegrity,” or tensional integrity, in the human body ...

Bob and Josh recount their first meeting after a silent meditation retreat ... Does yoga always have a spiritual component? ... How Josh’s yoga practice prepares the body for meditation ... How yoga’s focus on breath can lead to the body ... Solutions to modern distraction ... Bob: Mindfulness practice can erode essentialist thinking ... What’s the point of Bob’s Mindful Resistance Project? ... The present and future of the Mindful Resistance Newsletter ...

Why the Mortara case is still provoking argument 150 years later ... Pater Edmund offers a defense of Pope Pius IX ... Integralism and different conceptions of liberty ... What would an integralist Catholic state look like? ... How Pater Edmund became a monk (with a blog) ... The day-to-day life of a modern meditating monk ...

Puppet show: Why are human emotions unique? ... Does self-restraint make us human? ... Considering emotions as social constructs ... Stephen: If you have emotions, you have consciousness ... Artificial intelligence doesn’t necessarily defer to it its creator ... How insects are like robots ... Does culture change how the brain reads emotion in faces? ...

Growing up Very Catholic ... Sister Theresa’s atheist youth and subsequent return to faith ... Finding a calling within the Church ... Why remembering her own mortality is essential to Sister Theresa’s faith ... Sister Theresa: Not all believers understand their children’s doubt ...

Darwin’s approach to explaining the peacock’s cumbersome plumage ... Could beauty have evolved, in part, for beauty’s sake? ... The sense in which traits favored via mate selection may not be ‘adaptive’ ... Mate preference and aesthetics ... What can we learn from ducks’ miserable sex lives? ... How paternal investment in offspring became part of human life ... When sex isn’t for reproduction ... Richard’s misgivings about evolutionary psychology ...

Crispin’s “Why They Suck” essay series ... Why in particular does Michelangelo suck? ... The contrasts in humanism represented in Italian and Northern Renaissance art ... The “ennobling quality” of human emotion in early Renaissance art ... Why Dan is a humanist and Crispin is not ... Identifying the internal incoherence of Michelangelo’s work ... Dan: Judaism’s approach to moral agency begins in the Garden of Eden ... Crispin questions emphasizing human endeavors over all others ...

Why scientific materialism is harder to define than you think ... Galen explains panpsychism ... What does “mind is all there is to reality” mean? ... Is human consciousness epiphenomenal? ... Do physical laws come from somewhere? ... Is it like something to be a rock? (And is Galen saying it is?) ... Galen: Discussion of the mind-body problem was better 100 years ago ...

What does Dan K. mean by Philistinism? ... How philistines reduce the irreducible in all walks of life ... Philistinism’s creeping control in philosophy and the academy ... When we invest in arts and letters, what do we get in return? ... What good are refined senses, anyway? ... Dan T. explains how refinement can prevent us from being duped ...

Why is pop culture obsessed with good guy vs. bad guy stories? ... Catherine: Modern stories don't let the villain be fully human ... World War II and the trope of the ragtag band of misfits ... Shakespeare vs. comic book movies ... Storytelling about why we go to war ... What pop culture best represents moral complexity? ...