Derek Beres
Derek Beres is a freelance writer. Based in Portland, Oregon, he has served in senior editorial positions at a number of tech companies and has years of experience in health, science, and music writing. He is the co-host of the Conspirituality podcast and co-author of Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracies Became a Health Threat.
June 21 is International Yoga Day, a move sponsored by the Indian prime minister — and quickly capitalized upon by the Indian tourism board.
A spiritual practice helps us learn about ourselves. It’s also a great way to make money.
Psychedelics are showing promising results in helping a wide variety of ailments. But can they also result in addiction?
Psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD are being researched again after a 40-year hiatus, and the results are promising, from both a scientific and spiritual perspective.
Puritanism is not dead yet; the religious assumption of a nuclear family persists. Culturally, we’ve made great gains in same-sex marriage over the past half-decade, yet oddly the roles of women, in workplace pay and as caregivers, have not evolved much. Humans have long confused biology with theology.
Ideas about religion can be so powerful that people can’t endorse them without giving up a part of their identity. It’s the same thing with diets.
Last week’s events in Nepal and Baltimore were drastically different. Yet how people responded to two tragedies offer insight into how we deal with trauma and how we decide to offer compassion.
While Americans are more likely to vote for a gay candidate than an atheist, there has been an uptick in the percentage of those who say that their presidential choice’s faith plays no role in their decision — about six out of 10 Americans currently take that view.
Trying to sell an idea like immortality is probably as old as language itself. Like all heads at Google, Ray Kurzweil is selling an ideology, one that will eventually be capitalized upon by whoever holds the patent.
If the question of life or death resides in the hands of a deity, then the death penalty is a sin against that god. Yet if it’s in our own hands, a woman deciding whether or not to bring a child forth should not be made to feel guilty, or worse, that she herself has sinned.
While it’s easy to laugh off a pseudo-religion that battles cosmic tax auditors and exorcises invisible atomic volcanic gremlins, that’s merely the hypnotic gibberish hiding the organization’s true intention: amassing capital and property worldwide. And like many other religions, they’re wildly successful.
Like L. Ron Hubbard knew, the veneer of celebrity casts such a bright light that the details are obscured. Perhaps that’s why we call them “stars.” The closer you get, the harder to observe the shadows being cast.
Dishonesty in one domain doesn’t excuse hucksterism in another. Yet as long as healing remains a lucrative business, it’s going to remain a challenge weeding through the pretty designs and catchy slogans to find medicine that works.
Everyone you pass on the street, each person you drive by every day, has a story as well. To claim their death is not worth noticing is to say that their life was not worth living. And that’s too bad, because interdependence is something we all rely on every single day, knowingly or not.
“Much of what we now call ‘religion’ was originally rooted in an acknowledgement of the tragic fact that life depended on the destruction of other creatures,” writes Karen Armstrong.
To what degree are you allowed the privacy to grieve the loss of a family member? Christos Catsouras found out in October 2006. His 18-year-old daughter, Nikki, died after slamming […]
It’s hard to imagine empathy being anything but beneficial. It has become one of the most championed mental states in the neuroscience age: the ability to feel what someone else is feeling and, if all goes well, extend a hand altruistically or compassionately.
One day while walking through Rutgers’ Quad Two on the way to the gym, I noticed my friend Shelton across the lawn. As he bounced along the sidewalk—he was in […]
In his 1961 book, Psychotherapy East & West, the philosopher Alan Watts wrote, If there is to be a battle, there must be a field of battle; when the contestants […]
Most of us recognize soma as the ‘ideal pleasure drug’ in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In this context the pleasure was pacifying—it kept people in line without questioning their […]
It has been amusing listening to the religious right’s argument that marriage must be between a man and woman for one simple reason: the institution itself has been crumbling for […]
It may appear quite simple and easy, but the moment one sits down to practice, one quickly realizes that it is a difficult art. It would be hard to think […]
Like all major religions, there exists numerous ideas of what Buddhism is and how to practice it. Perhaps the hardest part about explaining Buddhism is that it’s nowhere near being […]
The Catholic Church has long regarded itself as a bastion of religious ethics. While it is undeniable numerous charitable efforts and organizations have arisen thanks to its emphasis on its […]
The results from my 23andMe test were not overly surprising. My heritage is predominantly Eastern European, something I already knew given my Hungarian surname and grandparental origins. There were a […]
Human beings have long been engaged in dramatic struggles. We want to honor our better angels, yet our demons wait on the corner, smirking. They know we’ll crack. Evolution has […]
A variety of responses rang out last week after Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. The SCOTUS’s decision to allow companies to deny employees access to certain forms of birth control was […]
The selfie continues its trajectory as a major form of communication in today’s social media universe. Named the Oxford Dictionary Online Word of the Year in 2013 the selfie has […]
An estimated two million American adults are involved in cults. While the definition of what a cult is ranges—some claim all religions to be one—it usually involves a charismatic leader […]
As Americans Google ‘David Brat’ to find out how this unknown college professor came to unseat one of the most prominent (on the right) and loathed (on the left) members […]