Leigh Eric Schmidt is Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities at Washington University. This interview is based on his new book, The Church of Saint Thomas Paine: A Religious History of American Secularism (Princeton University Press, 2021). JF: What led...
Get up to speed here. Pete Williamson is the team leader for InterVarsity’s Graduate and Faculty Ministries at Harvard and a Harvard Chaplain. Here is a taste of his recent piece at Christianity Today: For seven years, I have worked...
Harvard recently chose Greg Epstein, an atheist, as its new chief chaplain. Here is Emma Goldberg at The New York Times; The Puritan colonists who settled in New England in the 1630s had a nagging concern about the churches they...
As Washington University-St. Louis religion professor Leigh Eric Schmidt points out, religion, patriotism, and lost causes are not the only things people in America commemorate. Here is a taste of his Aeon piece, “Monuments to Unbelief” Materialising secularism, giving it ritual...
Leigh Eric Schmidt is Edward C. Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities at Washington University. This interview is based on his new book, Village Atheists:Â How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation (Princeton University Press, 2016). JF:...
Worship at an atheist mega-church According to Peter Berger, denominations are not dead. Â In fact, Roman Catholics, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus are all embracing various forms of denominationalism. Â So are atheists. This is how Berger explains the development of...
An organization called “American Atheists” has been protesting the inclusion of the so-called “Ground Zero Cross” in the taxpayer-funded National September 11 Museum in lower Manhattan. In American Atheists, Inc. vs. Port Authority of NY and NJ, a New York...
Thomas Jefferson did not believe that the Bible was divinely inspired. In fact, as we have noted here and here, he removed parts of the life of Jesus that did not conform to his rational form of religion. Nevertheless, Jefferson...
This is what Jon Rowe at American Creation calls this atheist billboard. Here is the story at the Huffington Post: A billboard in Costa Mesa, Calif., is getting some attention, but it’s certainly not the kind its sponsors were hoping...
Beginning in the Fall 2011 semester, Pitzer College, a liberal arts college in southern California, will offer a new major in secular studies. According to this article in The New York Times, it is the first of its kind. The...
Jackson Lears, a perceptive student of American cultural history, a history professor at Rutgers, and the editor of Raritan: A Quarterly Review, has a piece up at The Nation offering his thoughts about Sam Harris and the so-called “New Atheism.” […]
Last Friday night I traveled to Pittsburgh to give a talk on Was America Founded as a Christian Nation to the Center for Inquiry, a group of atheists with the mission of “fostering a secular society based on science, reason,...
According to this study out of Trinity College in Hartford, “educated elites” (people with masters degrees, doctorates, and professional degrees) are just as religious as the rest of America. Here is a snippet from Cathy Lynn Grossman’s blog at USA […]
According to this study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, most people are ignorant about religion. Check out Christopher Jones’s analysis over at Religion in American History. And guess who knows more about religion than anyone else?...
From the The New Republic: The point is not that atheism must invariably terminate in a tragic view of the world; another of Hart’s atheistic heroes, David Hume, seems to have thought that it was perfectly possible to live a […]
Religion Dispatches is running an interview with Jacob Needleman, Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State university and author of the recent What is God? (Penguin-Tarcher, 2009). The book describes his “journey from Ivy-educated professor and atheist, to talk about...
