Let Freedom Ring?

“In those days, it was very clear what the stakes were,” says editor Adam Bellow, reflecting on the careers of his mentor, the philosopher Allan Bloom, and his father, Saul Bellow, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist. “The confrontation of two superpowers in the cold war threw into stark relief the opposition between free and unfree societies.” Things have gotten cloudier since then, according to Bellow, who has edited and written the introduction for an essay collection called New Threats to Freedom, which has just been published by the Templeton Press.

Today's threats to freedom, he writes in his introduction, are “much less visible and obvious than they were in the twentieth century and may even appear in the guise of social and political progress.” Indeed, he argues, the danger often lies precisely in our “failure or reluctance to notice them.” Bellow assembled thirty writers from across the political spectrum—including Anne Applebaum, Richard A. Epstein, Mark Helprin, Christopher Hitchens, Robert D. Kaplan, David Mamet, Tara McKelvey, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Ron Rosenbaum, Lee Siegel, Shelby Steele, and Christina Hoff Sommers—and invited them to explore areas where they see individual freedom under siege.

Their choices may surprise some readers. Mamet, for instance, opposes recent efforts to revive the "fairness doctrine" in broadcast media, fearing that such power in the hands of the state might be the beginning of the end of free speech. Hitchens decries the intellectual conformity produced by the modern emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism. Kaplan writes about the "tyranny of the news cycle," which, to his mind, risks turning the public into an unthinking, uncritical mob. And both Rosenbaum and Siegel express concern about the wider cultural and political effects of the Internet.

Bellow emphasizes that New Threats is “not the usual ensemble of moaning and groaning" about Islamic extremism and the expanding reach of the federal government. Barry C. Lynn, for example, decries “the belief in false gods,” his term for why the public accepts phenomena like economic globalization and new technologies as inevitable and irresistible. Tara McKelvey worries that the Bush administration's failures with respect to democracy promotion have prompted an unfortunate retreat from this crucial goal of American foreign policy. And Michael Goodwin argues that we have gone too far in eliminating the "freedom to fail," thus undermining the freedom to succeed.

Photo: Sigrid Estrada

Adam Bellow

Bellow especially hopes to interest young people in the book’s ideas. “These are threats that individuals can do something about,” he says, adding that the essay collection should encourage future generations to “live in a way that doesn’t yield unconscious ground to new threats to freedom.”

For Susan Arellano, now in her second year as the editor-in-chief of the Templeton Press, the essay collection is an important step toward producing "books that will have appeal beyond the academic world" while also advancing the aims of the Foundation. As she says of New Threats, it powerfully captures the late Sir John Templeton's belief that “human progress in every sphere of life depends critically on preserving the freedoms of both individuals and enterprises."

Are Scientists Really Anti-Religious?

In her new book, Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think (Oxford University Press), Elaine Howard Ecklund provides the first systematic study of what scientists actually think and feel about religion. A sociologist at Rice University, Ecklund surveyed nearly 1,700 scientists and interviewed 275 of them, with the support of a grant from the Templeton Foundation. She found that most of what we believe about the faith lives of elite scientists is wrong. Nearly 50 percent of them are religious. Many others are what she calls "spiritual entrepreneurs," seeking creative ways to work with the tensions between science and faith outside the constraints of traditional religion.

The book centers around vivid portraits of ten representative men and women working in the natural and social sciences at top American research universities. Ecklund reveals how scientists—believers and skeptics alike—are struggling to engage the increasing number of religious students in their classrooms and argues that many scientists are searching for "boundary pioneers" to cross the picket lines separating science and religion.

Publishers Weekly praised the book for "dispelling myths about today’s science professors" and "offering an evidence-based peek behind the doors of academia." The Chronicle of Higher Education devoted an article to Ecklund's findings, which she also recently summarized in an op-ed for the Washington Post and a podcast interview with the Point of Inquiry Forum.

Is the Sabbath Worth Keeping?


VIDEO: Judith Shulevitz

The Foundation recently hosted a Templeton Book Forum conversation between Judith Shulevitz, author of The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, and the prolific author and Boston Globe columnist James Carroll. Shulevitz argues that the Sabbath is not just the day of rest. It is also an ideal to be lived up to—the vision of a time outside time and the promise of a less pressured existence. Where did the Sabbath come from? What will we lose if it disappears? Can it teach us new ways to think about time, even if we no longer follow its rules? Video clips from the conversation between Shulevitz and Carroll are now available on the Foundation's YouTube channel.