Author: Alexander Saxton
Alexander Saxton is professor of history emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti- Chinese Movement in California (1971, 1993), The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (1990, 2003), and Religion and the Human Prospect (2006).
Speaking Truth to Dr. Pangloss
The first decade of our twenty-first century opened with a series of disasters, most of human origin. In earlier times, human power remained too limited and localized to work ruin on a grand scale; big disasters had to be natural. Thus Voltaire in Candide, satirizing Leibniz for his cosmic optimism, takes a fictionalized Leibniz—Dr. Pangloss, …
The Great God Debate and the Future of Faith
The “Great God Debate” that ushered in the twenty-first century of our so-called Common Era brought atheism to the top of U.S. best-seller lists. This in itself i s historic: nothing quite like it has happened since the 1890s, when Mark Twain, Robert Ingersoll, and Jack London—world-class nonbelievers all—held mass audiences spellbound with their radical …
Believers, Atheists, and Human Survival
The disasters of the past decade serve notice that our present century will be remembered—should there be anyone left to remember it—as the century in which humans (our species!) confronted the crises of ecological burnout and proliferating weapons of mass destruction. How we handle the crises will determine the future of life on Earth. My …