In 2008, the New York Times published an op-ed piece by David Brooks, a well-known commentator from the conservative wing of American politics. As the provocative title "The Neural Buddhists" suggests, the article made what was on the face of it the fairly extraordinary claim that the "cognitive revolution" in the biological sciences was leading to a coming together of science and Buddhism, and that the resulting synthesis would serve to transcend the apparently unbreachable divide between religious scripturalism and theism on the one hand and secularism and atheism on the other.