"In medieval times, when life was so narrowly circumscribed, religious pilgrimage was pretty much the only excuse a claustrophobic peasant had to leave his or her stupid little village, so a pilgrimage was an exercise in novelty and adventure under the banner of obligation; now, so many of us feel so surfeited with choice, the...

"We all go through a similar process of being formed by the culture around us. It is something described well in Bruce Wexler’s book Brain and Culture: Neuroscience, Ideology and Social Change , in which Wexler argues that much of human conflict arises from our efforts to reconcile the world as we believe it to...