The 2024 World Happiness Report is out, and Finland is on top (the UK is number 20). I have recently been listening to the marvellous Moomin books by the Finnish author Tove Jannson (on Audible, read by Hugh Dennis). They reveal a quirky sense of humour and a penetrating understanding .
A lot of people seem to mean a lot of different things by ‘prayer’. I once went to what was advertised as an Augustinian prayer day. That sounded eminently attractive, I thought: I’m interested in Augustine, and I’m interested in prayer. What we were told to do, however, was to .
Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist who has been extremely helpful in explaining why people think about right and wrong in the way they do. One particularly useful insight of his was to point out that those who leaned to the liberal left tended to decide that things were morally .
I recently read that Richard Dawkins underwent an experiment in 2003 where magnetic fields were applied to his head. It was meant to stimulate the temporal lobes and create a religious experience. It failed on Dawkins; apparently his temporal lobe sensitivity is much lower than average. On others, however, the .