Author: Susan Jacoby

I do not remember when or under what circumstances I first met Tom Flynn, but I do know why we hit it off right away. Like me, Tom was devoted to reviving the public’s memory of Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899). He was the only person I knew who was as outraged as I was by …

Almost alone among Golden Age freethinkers, Ingersoll’s ideas about women would not seem out of place today.

God’s proposed attributes simply can’t be reconciled with the presence of evil. But that only poses new moral challenges for atheists.

It isn’t surprising that the secular movement in America has been characterized by historical discontinuities that, in a number of respects, resemble the amnesia that held back feminism for so long.

At the pioneering program “Women in Secularism” sponsored in May 2012 by the Center for Inquiry–Washington D.C., I discussed some of the reasons—from the greater religiosity of women to actual denigration of female intellect by some male secular activists (which you wouldn’t think would exist among male creatures who pride themselves on their rationality)—for the …

When I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, almost no one in politics or everyday life went around proclaiming, “I am a Christian.” If indeed you were a Christian—that is, someone who considers Jesus Christ the Messiah—you identified yourself as a Lutheran, a Methodist, a Baptist, a Catholic, and so on in excelsis …

Nearly everyone now takes for granted the wisdom, constitutionality, and inevitability of some form of federal financing for community social services run by religious groups. Who anymore can imagine that the United States managed to exist for over two hundred years without the government providing any direct aid to faith and its works? It is …

The Press Of The Past Was More Progressive Before I address the way today’s press does—or, more frequently, does not—incorporate a nonreligious perspective in its coverage of public issues, I would like to treat you to a sample of the kind of coverage that the “secularist perspective” received 125 years ago. On May 23, 1880, …