Author: Edd Doerr

Overpopulation was the cause of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, which the world has largely overlooked.

Outrage over Hobby Lobby—and a priest turns (sort of?) secular humanist.

A review of Teachers versus the Public: What Americans Think about Schools and How to Fix Them, by Paul E. Peterson.

Daring Pope Francis to reconcile his church to today’s world; New Orleans loses its last public schools.

A review of Good Catholics: The Battle over Abortion in the Catholic Church, by Patricia Miller.

“Perhaps you didn’t know that [Carl] Sagan was also an important champion of abortion rights.”

A review of Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?, by Alan Weisman.

The data actually undermine claims that private, especially religious, schools deliver better education.

A review of The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools, by Christopher A. Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski.

On December 3, 2013, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers reported on two interesting lawsuits.

Make no mistake: America’s public schools, an indispensable component of our religiously neutral (that is, secular) democracy, are under serious siege.

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in attacks on public schools, which serve about 90 percent of K–12 students in the United States.

Corsi claims that Christianity and Christian values, or at least his crabbed vision of them, are in grave danger of being destroyed by an all-out “War against God” being waged by the “Bad Samaritan” American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Australia and the United States have much in common. Both are English-speaking, continent-wide former British colonies. Both pretty much displaced their indigenous populations. Both are reasonably prosperous today. America’s founders, with fresh or not-so-fresh memories of Europe’s centuries of religious conflict, had the wisdom and foresight to put the concept of separation of church and …

Culture Wars: The Threat to Your Family and Your Freedom, by Marie Alena Castle (Tucson: See Sharp Press, 2013, ISBN 978-1-937276-47-8) 236 pp. Paperback, $14.95. Black Tuesday—March 26, 2013— made very clear the importance of books like Marie Alena Castle’s Culture Wars: The Threat to Your Family and Your Freedom. On that day, the Indiana …

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the American national government’s founders, following the lead of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in Virginia, incorporated these words into the Constitution’s First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In 1802 Jefferson explained that these words built …

The Enlightenment Vision: Science, Reason, and the Promise of a Better Future, by Stuart Jordan (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2013, ISBN 978-161614-640-5) 284 pp. Hardcover, $26. Thanks to the thinkers and activists of the seventeenth and eighteenth century period in Western Europe and America called the Enlightenment, increasing numbers of people have enjoyed a better life …

Tracing ‘Secular Humanism’ Since the mid-1970s, “secular humanism” has been the bête noire, scapegoat, and whipping boy of the religious Right. Francis Schaeffer, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and their legions of followers and imitators blamed the world’s troubles on “secular humanists,” whom they claimed control the government, courts, media, public schools and universities, and the …

On December 18, 2012, PBS broadcast a ninety-minute documentary titled First Freedom: The Fight for Religious Liberty. An excellent introduction to the subject, it traced the evolution of religious freedom in the United States from early colonial times to shortly after 1800, coming down nicely on the side of church-state separation and using a great …

A Provocative People: A Secular History of the Jews, by Sherwin T. Wine (Farmington Hills, Mich.: International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, 2012, ISBN 978-0-9851516-0-7) 508 pp. Papeback, $24.95 Sherwin Wine (1928-2007) was the founder of the Humanistic Judaism movement (the fifth strain of organized Judaism in addition to Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Orthodox), the …

Realising Secularism: Australia and New Zealand, edited by Max Wallace (Milsons Point, NSW, Australia: Australia New Zealand Secular Association, 2010, ISBN 987-0-646-52720-8A) 161 pp. Paperback. Australia, New Zealand, and the United States have much in common. All three are English-speaking, more-or-less democratic former British colonies that largely displaced indigenous peoples. They have similar histories and …

November 6 was a good day for President Barack Obama. The Democrats increased their majority in the Senate and gained a few seats in the House. The popular vote for the House favored the Democrats, but the Republicans retained control thanks to gerrymandering in “red” states after the 2010 election. The percentage of women in …

Thanks to the Brothers Grimm, we are all familiar with the tale of Hansel and Gretel, the young brother and sister who were abandoned by their father and stepmother in the woods of medieval Germany. While the tale is fiction, it is actually a metaphor for a practice that was rather common during long stretches …

In the early 1950s, I was a guest on a Sunday evening talk-show in Indianapolis discussing the overpopulation problem. World population then was less than a third of today’s seven-billion-and-counting. The following morning’s newspaper headlined a hysterical rant about the audacity of discussing something so controversial in anything above a whisper. The talk-show host was …

“Vagina. The passage leading from the uterus to the vulva.” So says the 1998 Webster’s American Family Dictionary, a “family” reference work “to record the standard vocabulary of American English in a way that reflects the common ethical, moral, religious, social, and civic values of mainstream Americans.” This 1,124-page volume is so prissy that it …

Across America public school budgets are being slashed even though they are already too skimpy in most states. Teachers, librarians, counselors, and other staff are being laid off. Class sizes are being increased. Teacher job satisfaction is declining. Conservative lawmakers are attacking teacher unions on collective bargaining and tenure, evidently trying to make the teaching …

On January 20, 2012, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (a Catholic) issued regulations, effective next year, that would require church-related institutions such as hospitals, universities, and social service agencies to provide coverage for birth control in their employee health-insurance plans and without a co-payment. The new HHS regulations were recommended by the …

The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, by Katherine Stewart (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2012, ISBN-13:978-58648-843-7) 291 pp., $25.99. Without doubt, The Good News Club is one of the most important books to appear this year. In it, investigative reporter Katherine Stewart exposes the staggeringly serious under-the-radar tsunami of …

On November 8, 2011, Mississippians voted 58 percent to 42 percent to reject a proposed state constitutional amendment intended to establish legal “personhood” at the moment of fertilization or implantation. The amendment, supported by leaders of both political parties in this most religious of all states, was aimed at outlawing all abortions and several types …

“The Threats to a Crucial Canopy: Deaths of Forests May Weaken Controls on Heat-Trapping Gas” was the headline of a two-page report by Justin Gillis in the New York Times on October 1, 2011. Color maps accompanying the comprehensive article made dramatically clear that our planet’s forest cover—a primary reservoir for long-term sequestration of carbon—is …

Operating largely below the public’s—and the media’s—radar is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an ultraconservative policy shop founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich (one of the founders of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority). Its mission is to influence state legislatures, far too many of whose members are only too happy to accept “expert” advice. ALEC …

On May 11, Education Week published this letter of mine: The four states discussed in the article “GOP Lawmakers Press Voucher Expansion in States” (April 27, 2011) are among the 39 states whose constitutions prohibit tax aid to religious institutions, but, tellingly, are not among the 14 states (including the District of Columbia) where voters …

April Fools’ Day arrived three days late this year. The victims of the prank were the American people and the United States Constitution. The perpetrators were the five Supreme Court justices appointed by Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. Here’s what happened. On April 4, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 to reverse a decision …

It has been nearly a decade since fanatics hijacked planes and crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. As this is being written, multiple political tsunamis guided by other fanatics are engulfing the U.S. Capitol and many state capitols. This column has space for dealing with only two of them: those aimed at forcing …

Fading Faith: The Rise of the Secular Age, by James A. Haught (Cranford, N.J.: Gustav Broukal Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1-57884-009-0) 167 pp. Paper, $16.00. Jim Haught, no stranger to readers of this journal, is the longtime editor of the Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, a former press aide to the late Senator Robert Byrd, and …

November’s election results do not bode well for church-state separation and democratic, humanist values. Although “social issues” did not dominate the news coverage throughout 2010, the election outcomes seriously enhanced the political strength of the religious Right. We will see new pushes in Congress and state legislatures for a range of schemes to divert public …

Education “reform,” whatever that might mean, is on the front burner. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) plan has led to a frenzy of testing that has narrowed and weakened curric ula, led to an epidemic of “teaching to the test,” and stimulated the proliferation of charter schools, which have on balance done …

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff, writing in his 2004 book Don’t Think of an Elephant, attacked George W. Bush’s signature No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education “refor m” legislation. NCLB instituted a regime of testing, not only of students but also of schools. “Failing” schools could have their funding cut back. Wrote Lakoff: “Less funding in …

 The Loser Letters: A Comic Tale of Life, Death, and Atheism, by Mary Eberstadt (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1-58617-431-6) 148 pp. Paper $13.95. Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity, by S.E. Cupp (New York: Threshold Editions, 2010, ISBN 978-1-4391-7316-9) 269 pp. Cloth $24.00. Shortly after the 1994 United Nations …

Q: What do these countries have in common: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States? A: All have been in the news this year regarding the ongoing clerical sexual-abuse scandals roiling the Catholic Church. Even the briefest summary of the …