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Excerpts from Wayward—A Memoir of Spiritual Warfare and Sexual Purity
In her new book Wayward—A Memoir of Spiritual Warfare and Sexual Purity, noted actress Alice Greczyn (The Lying Game) describes a harrowing past rooted in some of the most popular and destructive fads to sweep Christian Right communities in recent decades. Among them are a focus on the “purity” of young women so extreme that …
Pivot Point – The Problem of Evil Did It
A Parental Gift Barbara Lynne Conroy I was raised Catholic “light.” When I was a child, my family attended church only on Sundays and “required” holidays. I attended Catholic school until I completed fourth grade. I lobbied my parents hard to let me go to public school. When I was twelve years old (this was …
The Evangelization of Lawlessness: RFRA Was the First ‘Big Lie’
It has taken over twenty years, but Congress is finally holding hearings to limit the impact of the toxic Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) on civil rights. Two bills have been introduced in Congress that would carve back RFRA’s destructive reach—the Equality Act and the Do No Harm Act. Both focus on curtailing the capacity …
This article is available for free to all.Phil Zuckerman and Ten Years of Secular Studies at Pitzer College: A Critical Examination
In 2011, Pitzer College offered the first—and still the only—college major in secular studies. The prime mover behind that initiative was Dr. Phil Zuckerman, who in 2011 wrote that he could “sense the thirst out there. So many students, perhaps galvanized by the New Atheists, wanted to take classes that challenged religious worldviews, explored the …
This article is available for free to all.Adventures of a Nascent Atheist Abroad
The year was 1979. I was publishing a racy, little state-of-the-art diagnostic medical ultrasound catalogue distributed to radiologists in the United States and Europe. Printed in Denver, the Clinical Ultrasound Purchaser’s Catalogue was disseminated via KLM Royal Dutch Handling Service in Holland. The Iranian hostage crisis made that a losing proposition—I had to scrap the …
Ethnographic Evidence for Unbelief in Non-Western Cultures: Unbelief in Ancient Israel, Egypt, and Babylon
In the past sixty years or so, historians and theologians have pointed to what one of them has termed “the biblical sources of secularization.” Others believe that at the time of the Protestant Reformation, the recovery of the Hebraic worldview did much to foster the growth of a naturalistic outlook in the West. “Hebraic culture …
This article is available for free to all.A Tale of Two Journals
In the February/March 2021 issue, I wrote a brief item noting the end of The Humanist, the longtime bimonthly journal of the American Humanist Association (AHA), as “a magazine of critical inquiry and social concern.” (Free Inquiry founder Paul Kurtz first came to prominence in the humanist movement as editor of The Humanist in the …
The Democrats Reembrace Religion
For the past four years, secular folks have been concerned with the threat posed by White Christian Nationalism and the Trump Administration’s subservience to the religious Right, particularly regarding the appointment of conservatives to the federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court. The new president is a pious Catholic and regular Mass-attender, so we can …
This article is available for free to all.The Painting on Governor Kemp’s Wall
Congress is currently (as I write this) working on a voting-rights bill. It’s depressing having to say that, because we thought it was done already, years ago, back in 1965. It happened in the wake of a horror known as Bloody Sunday, when state troopers and local police brutally attacked a group of civil rights …
Toleration and Its Discontents
Questions about religious toleration have arisen in many great civilizations, including those of China, India, and the Islamic world. In Western Christendom, however, they became most salient after the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation triggered persecutions and wars across Europe, with such highlights (or lowlights) as the burning of Michael Servetus at the stake in Calvinist Geneva, …