November / December 2007

Humanism and Its Discontents

Joyce Carol Oates was presented with the 2007 Humanist of the Year award at the 66th Annual Conference of the American Humanist Association in Portland, Oregon, on June 8, 2007. The following article was adapted from her acceptance speech and the Q&A that followed. Humanism--like "the humanities" and indeed all...

Read More

Features

Up Front

God Is Great

I have a fantasy that I participate in a debate against Christopher Hitchens, the best-selling author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. The debate topic is identical to the one Hitchens took up...

Read More

Columns

Reviews

Elsewhere in the Humanist:

The Black Practice of Disbelief

The following excerpt is from a new book from Beacon Press, set to be published in May 2024. Introduction I have grown to like “nontheist” as a broad-spectrum term that carries less baggage than more commonly used words such as “atheist” or...

Read All

Elsewhere in the Humanist:

“I Stand for Freedom for All”

This text is excerpted from the remarks of Commissioner Mohamed Magid of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom made at the launch event for the 2023 Freedom of Thought Report from Humanists International. The event was held on Capitol Hill in...

Read All

Elsewhere in the Humanist:

The Dangers of Artificial Intelligence

Editor’s note: OpenAI’s now famous ChatGPT bot was used by the Humanist to generate this article as an experiment to discover what today’s AI knows 
and will tell about the dangers posed by AI technology. IN RECENT YEARS, the rapid advancements in...

Read All

Elsewhere in the Humanist:

The Fragility of Truth in the Existential Crisis

Dr. Michael E. Mann is Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication. He is director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and...

Read All