What is the "secular"? Is it a state of official neutrality, or is it one in which religious influences are on the wane? This "polysemy" about "the secular" permeates our public and legal discussions and has unfortunate consequences for debates over our constitutional arrangements. In these comments, I will suggest that a different vocabulary—a vocabulary of religious freedom rather than secularity—is both more accurate and more conducive to mutually respectful constitutional debate.

A recent single cell mRNA sequencing study by Dueck et al. compares neuronal transcriptomes to the transcriptomes of adipocytes and cardiomyocytes. Single cell ‘omic approaches such as those used by the authors are at the leading edge of molecular and biophysical measurement. Many groups are currently employing single cell sequencing approaches to understand cellular heterogeneity in cancer and during normal development. These single cell approaches also are beginning to address long‐standing questions regarding nervous system diversity. Beyond an innate interest in (...) cataloging cell type diversity in the brain, single cell neuronal diversity has important implications for neurotypic neural circuit function and for neurological disease. Herein, we review the authors’ methods and findings, which most notably include evidence of unique expression profiles in some single neurons. (shrink)