At the confluence of India’s holiest rivers, two childhood friends meet and share the respective traditions to which they have committed their lives.

Plofker’s book fills a huge gap: a detailed, eminently readable, scholarly survey of the full scope of Indian mathematics and astronomy (the two were inseparable in India) from their Vedic beginnings to roughly 1800.

Patanjali and other early authorities on the Yoga tradition assert that ahimsa, nonaggression, is as integral to yoga as meditation is, and Rosen’s contributors cite all the right sources, making this clear and obvious.

Steven J. Rosen (Satyaraja Dasa) is one of the most prolific of our modern Gaudiya Vaishnava authors, with innumerable books and articles to his credit. In Krishna’s Other Song, he attempts something new: scriptural commentary.

For Goldberg, it all adds up to the slow “Vedicization” of American spirituality. By this he means that Americans have become more comfortable with a view of the world ultimately found in the ancient literature of India—the Vedas, the Upanisads, and the Bhagavad-gita.

“And what a delicious irony it is that science, that model of sober investigation, is inexorably returning us to vistas so peculiarly like the deranged imaginings of our ‘superstitious’ past.”

In his book, Examined Lives: From Socrates to Neitzsche, James Miller

It is true that conservative religion is growing. But any talk of a religious revival is “an optical illusion.”

Byrne describes a methodology: First, imagine yourself having it. Second, feel yourself with it. Third, receive it. If you don’t receive it, that must be because you messed up steps one and two.

“The brilliance of the phrase ‘I told you so’ derives from its admirably compact way of making the point that not only was I right, I was also right about being right. In the instant of uttering it, I become right squared, maybe even right factorial…”

Harris puts himself at odds with a principle put forward by philosopher David Hume and regarded as inviolable by many: the idea that statements about how things ought to be cannot be derived from statements about what is true.