Author: Frank L. Pasquale
Frank L. Pasquale, Ph.D., is a cultural anthropologist doing research and writing on religion, humanism, church-state separation, morality, and ethics.
The Social Science of Secularity
Something novel happened during this century’s first decade: Social scientists (re)discovered the nonreligious. Call it “reaching critical ma ss” or a “tipping point,” but suddenly quite a few researchers in quite a few places began to focus their attention directly on the nonreligious—not just as a foil for better understanding the religious but as a …
The Quintessential Secular Institution
If you were asked to identify the most pervasive and influential secular institution in human affairs, what would you say? I suspect that most would reflexively think of civil government, but I don’t think that is the right answer. Governments, after all, range from substantially secular to theocratic with many gradations in between. Even in …
Making the Manifesto: The Birth of Religious Humanism
Making the Manifesto: The Birth of Religious Humanism, by William F. Schulz (Boston, Mass.: Skinner House Books, Unitarian Universalist Association, 2002, ISBN 1-55896–429-0) 164 pp., including Introduction, Endnotes, Index. Paper $18. Humanist Manifesto I (1933) may be viewed as a convergence of two themes in Western intellectual history: the selective redefinition of religion and the …
When Religion Becomes Evil
When Religion Becomes Evil, by Charles Kimball (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002, ISBN 0-06–050653-9) 240 pp., including Notes and Selected Bibliography. Cloth $21.95. It seems to come as a perennial surprise to many that religious faith gives rise to terrible beliefs and acts. The lessons of human history do not seem to dispel the widely …