This is part 3 of our series of interviews with Frans de Waal. Check out part 1 and part 2 of our interview series. Frans de Waal is an eminent primatologist renowned not only for his many publications in scientific journals, but also for several widely read books, including Chimpanzee Politics and, more recently, The Bonobo and the Atheist. In the latter work, Professor de Waal explores how non-human primates, even in the absence of anything we might call “religion,” have a profound capacity for empathy and social cohesion in a way that may serve as a basis for morality in the case of humans. Speaking […]
An Interview with Frans de Waal Part 3: Science & Religion
An Interview with Frans de Waal Part 2: Freud, Biology of Morality, and a Secular Ethics
This is part 2 of our series of interviews with Frans de Waal. Check out part 1 of our interview here. Frans de Waal is an eminent primatologist renowned not only for his many publications in scientific journals, but also for several widely read books, including Chimpanzee Politics and, more recently, The Bonobo and the Atheist. In the latter work, Professor de Waal explores how non-human primates, even in the absence of anything we might call “religion,” have a profound capacity for empathy and social cohesion in a way that may serve as a basis for morality in the case of humans. Speaking with […]
An Interview with Jeffrey Kripal, Part Three: The Future of Religious Studies
In conversation with Paul Courtright of Emory University, Jeffrey Kripal, of Rice University, discusses his new textbook, Comparing Religions: Coming to Terms. Professor Kripal’s latest book is a departure from the traditional “world religions” textbook. He frames the adventure of the comparative study of religion as a kind of passage from conventional categories of religion, through an analysis of key themes and modes of reading texts and histories, to a reflexive re-reading in which the students rediscover themselves in relation to religion at the conclusion of the textbook and the course in which Professor Kripal has used it. Our conversation ranges across a number of issues in […]