Writing on the Wall: Social Media—The First 2,000 Years
Tom Standage’s self-imposed mandate is to assuage our technoterror. In books like his laudable study of the telegraph, The Victorian Internet (1998), and An Edible History of Humanity (2009), the author demonstrated, mostly successfully, that... Read More
Religion Without God
Ronald Dworkin’s last book, Religion Without God, is simultaneously a blast from the past and a sign of the times. He claims to be religious and atheist in a manner that has some parallels in... Read More
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
I sometimes have the impression that philosophers write books mainly for each other. Not so Daniel Dennett, whose latest book is aimed at ordinary civilians like us, and couched in language we can understand without... Read More
The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God
In The Selfish Gene (1976) Richard Dawkins proposed the term “meme” as a unit of cultural transmission analogous to the gene, in that both are transmitters of information. The gene’s information is expressed in its... Read More
Book Review: The God Argument by A.C. Grayling
With his new book, The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, A.C. Grayling, the London-based author of The Good Book: A Humanist Bible, gives us exactly what he promises in the book’s... Read More
Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels
Sikivu Hutchinson is an author and activist who promotes a progressive—and aggressive—conception of humanism that is at once feminist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-classist, and anti-imperialist. She has no patience for nontheists who focus primarily on church/state... Read More
Becoming More Fully Human: Religious Humanism as a Way of Life
“The human being is by nature a social animal (Ho anthrōpos phusei politikon zōon).” —Aristotle, Politics (see also Nicomachean Ethics) In 2006, three years after retiring as the head of the Meadville Lombard Theological School... Read More