Mark Lilla, writing the cover story for this week’s New York Times Magazine, uses the word theotropism. While a Google search reveals that this is not a neologism, I am delighted to run across such a succint term that captures the all-too-common drive to construe the world in divine, supernatural ways. My own speculation is that this is a mechanism for making sense of the environment that was useful in our infancy, as individuals and as a species—but which now all too easily leads us astray as sects feel called upon to enforce divine will on the unbelievers and apostates.
