The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates
As handsome, beloved Amos lay dying, Daisy did her best to make him comfortable. Daisy seemed to grasp Amos’s situation and, being part of a tight-knit community, Amos could count on affection and assistance from... Read More
Icarus of Brooklyn: A Spiritual Quest Gone Wrong
In the last decade we have allowed the primary interest of dignity and the human element in humanism to be slowly superseded by a popular anti-theism that declares religious people stupid, and us intellectually superior.... Read More
How to Build an Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the elites of Europe and the United States were thrilled by what they perceived as a rather sophisticated class of automatons, mechanical marvels that could do everything from play... Read More
Book Review: The Great Agnostic by Susan Jacoby
Let me start by saying what this book is not. The Great Agnostic by Susan Jacoby is not a biography of Robert Ingersoll. It is, rather, an argument for restoring Ingersoll to a respected place... Read More
When God Wept
If ever there were a day deserving to be called—secularly—a “day of reckoning,” this would be the day for Owen Ross, the forty-seven-year-old protagonist of Jon Mills’ provocative first novel, When God Wept. For it... Read More
Joseph Anton: A Memoir
I perforce begin with a confession: I couldn’t finish Salman Rushdie’s two most notable novels, Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses. I don’t love magical realism generally—I hated García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—and... Read More
The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children
When Katherine Stewart first saw a program called the “Good News Club” on the list of available after-school activities at her daughter’s public elementary school in Santa Barbara, California, she didn’t give it much thought,... Read More