Category: Humanism and the Arts
The Pandemic and Camus’s Plague
After World War II, the French novelist Albert Camus published The Plague, a fictional account of a plague that hits a north African town. While Camus’s narrative is in part an allegory of the plague of world war and Nazism, it is fundamentally about the different psychological and ethical reactions to the suffering, …
The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn
The cry of the individual conscience, asserting itself in voice and action against the oppressive rule of custom and the law, echoes throughout the literature of the Western world. Sophocles’s Antigone defies the power of the state to give her brothers’ bodies a decent burial. When, in Ibsen’s A Doll House, Nora’s husband tells her …
Nineteen Questions with T. C. Boyle
Cover Image: T.C. Boyle, Wikipedia Santa Barbara, California—It’s like he’s saying, “I’ll take you there.” When it comes to freethinkers, American author T. C. Boyle (Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Southern California) is the Daliesque prince, a commentator for the tragicomedy that is our mutual existence. When the subtle meets the …
A Tribute to Harry Harrison
Most obituaries written shortly after the August 15, 2012, death of best-selling science-fiction writer Harry Harrison remembered him as the author of Make Room! Make Room!, the novel upon which the Charlton Heston movie Soylent Green was loosely based. But Harrison’s significance to the genre of science fiction, and to secular humanism, transcends this distasteful …
A Linguistic Consequence of Music Appreciation
Music appreciation is almost impossible to explain as a product of evolution, as illustrated by this quotation from Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man: “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man . . . they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious …
A.E. Housman: Poet, Scholar, Atheist
Though his poetry comprises but four slender volumes—A Shropshire Lad (ASL), Last Poems, More Poems (MP), and Additional Poems (AP), the last two published posthumously—Alfred Edward Housman (1859–1936) belongs in the pantheon of English poets. Born in Worcestershire, in the environs of the Shropshire hills, Housman liked to amble through highland, field, and dale. As …
What Would Darwin Do?
Preparing to be Charles Darwin is always demanding. It requires at least an hour just to get into costume—putting on the beard alone takes some thirty minutes. However, it is mentally becoming Darwin that is most difficult, for I must suppress my own identity and think as Darwin would—not imagine being Darwin but really think …
Nikos Kazantzakis (1885–1957)
In 1988, fundamentalist Christians in several nations vented rage and violence because a movie, The Last Temptation of Christ, portrayed Jesus as a wavering human who lusted for the prostitute Mary Magdalene. A Paris theater showing the film was firebombed, sending thirteen people to hospitals. Another, at Besancon, France, suffered a similar attack. Tear gas …