Extremism in the defense of everything...

In the 1980's our debates about religion turned from intellectual exercises among some of the nations greatest thinkers and philosophers to shrill cultural diatribes disconnected from from thought and context. In many ways it was the precursor to our political and cultural debates today; empty,extreme and fundamental.Will we ever again find a middle ground, or has the echo chamber, as David Brooks so clearly points out in his column today, subsumed any reasonable chance to separate the sacred from the screed? Author and philosopher Sam Keen, in his new book, In the Absence of God: Dwelling in the Presence of the Sacred, examines the seemingly odd notion that religion, in its most traditional, non dogmatic form, may hold the secret to unite rather than divide us. My conversation with Sam Keen: