Chris Hedges on the religious right and new atheists

In this video journalist and writer Chris Hedges identifies certain parallels in the ideologies of the religious right in the US and a group of people that he calls "new atheists". One of the points that has stuck with me from his discussion is the notion that both religion and art are ways of engaging with the non-rational. He makes it clear that the non-rational is not to be thought of as synonymous with the irrational. This reminded me of a contribution by Rowan Williams to an issue of New Scientist that considered the question of reason. Williams writes;

Until the early Middle Ages, being "reasonable" was primarily a matter of being aware of where you belonged in the cosmos... Being reasonable was like singing in tune (an analogy the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome loved to use) with who you were and what the universe was like.

From these ideas we can draw a link between reason and rationality and perhaps start to think about rationality as a kind of "singing in tune with who you are and what the universe is like". The idea here is to start to imagine and define alternative rationalities that might cover some of the ground that lies beyond the way science approaches the rational.