Category: Reviews
Getting Our Story Straight
A review of Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic, by Matthew Stewart.
Claims for Meditation’s Benefits Overreach
A review of Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, by Sam Harris.
This article is available for free to all.The Sociologists Are In
A review of Atheist Awakening: Secular Activism and Community in America, by Richard Cimino and Christopher Smith.
The Enduring Value of Philosophy
A review of Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.
Unconstructive Criticism of Public Education
A review of Teachers versus the Public: What Americans Think about Schools and How to Fix Them, by Paul E. Peterson.
Living Well in the Age of Atheism
A review of The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God, by Peter Watson.
How to Come Out of the Atheist Closet
A review of Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, by Greta Christina.
The Battle of the Pro-Choice Catholics
A review of Good Catholics: The Battle over Abortion in the Catholic Church, by Patricia Miller.
Facing the Facts
A review of Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism, edited by C. M. Hays and C. B. Ansberry.
An Urgent Call for Population Limits
A review of Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?, by Alan Weisman.
Gimme That Old-Time Atheism
A review of Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World, by Mitchell Stephens.
Less Secular Than It Seems
A review of Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, by Jennifer Michael Hecht.
This article is available for free to all.An Education on Education
A review of The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools, by Christopher A. Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski.
An Important Book
A review of An Imperfect Book: What the Book of Mormon Tells Us about Itself, by Earl M. Wunderli.
Of Facts and Fictions
A review of Bullspotting: Finding Facts in the Age of Misinformation, by Loren Collins.
Earth’s Evidence Refutes the Flood
A review of The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood, by David Montgomery.
Speaking—at Last!—of Forbidden Things
A review of Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation, edited by Philip Cafaro and Eileen Crist, with a foreword by Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich.
In Praise of the Science-Guided Life
A review of The Way of Science: Finding Truth and Meaning in a Scientific Worldview, by Dennis R. Trumble.
Helping Seculars Gain Traction in Government
The Citizen Lobbyist teaches its reader how a private citizen can lobby effectively in the halls of government. Period. And it does so without a wasted word.
Wrongly Accused
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).
Ochre Athena
Sadakat Kadri’s book, Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Shari’a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World, is wonderfully written, witty, and informative.
Drowning in Doubt
One part memoir, one part expose, religion-to-reason travelogues do more than satisfy our curiosity. They remind us that whether we roll the boulder of belief away slowly or shatter it with a single blow, we are not the first or the only ones to have done so.
Sorting out Religion with Brian Leiter
Why Tolerate Religion?, by Brian Leiter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-691-15361-2) 187 pp. Hardcover, $24.95. Brian Leiter’s new book on secularism and religious freedom, Why Tolerate Religion?, has received much attention. It is a useful contribution to the discussion of an important group of issues, and it was appropriately the topic of a …
The Nothing That Is Not There and the Everything That Is
The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, by A.C. Grayling (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, ISBN 978-1-62040-190-3) 269 pp. Cloth, $26.00. British philosopher A.C. Grayling must certainly be familiar to many readers of Free Inquiry, for he has long been associated with the new atheism movement, and The God Argument might be read …
What’s Wrong with This Picture?
There Is No God: Atheists in America, by David A. Williamson and George Yancey (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2013, ISBN 978-1-4422-1849-9) 150 pp. Hardcover, $36.00. There Is No God: Atheists in America offers very little that is new or noteworthy in the budding field of social scientific research on atheists in the …
The Current State of Threats to Secularism
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 …
A Conversation That’s Fodder for More
God or Godless: One Atheist. One Christian. Twenty Controversial Questions, by John W. Loftus and Randal Rauser (Ada, MI: Baker Publishing, 2013, ISBN 978-0-8010-1528-1) 203 pp. Paperback, $13.99. Baker deserves a lot of credit for publishing God or Godless: One Atheist. One Christian. Twenty Controversial Questions. It represents a departure from the traditional evangelical Christian …
Understanding Our Differences
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012, ISBN 978-0-307-37790-6) 448 pp. Hardcover, $28.95. Are consequentialist ethics adequate? According to University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, they are not. They suffer from two crucial flaws. First, they depend too heavily on reasoning …
Appreciating the Achievements of the Enlightenment
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 …
Behind Beguiling Error, a Call to Action
What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster, by Jonathan V. Last (New York: Encounter Books, 2013, ISBN 978-159403-641-5). 230 pp. Hardcover, $23.99. The title of this book riffs archly on a current mega–best seller (What to Expect When You’re Expecting), which should give you a clue about author Jonathan V. Last’s …
Mormon Marriage Made Funny
“It’s Not About the Sex,” My Ass: Confessions of an ExMormon ExPolygamist ExWife, by Joanne Hanks as told to Steve Cuno (Self-published: 2012, ISBN 978-1-105-99740-2 paper) 171 pp. Paperback, $15.97. Available in paperback or Kindle on Amazon.com; available in hardcover, paperback, Kindle, Nook, iBook, and eBook at www.itsnotaboutthesexmyass.com. We seldom review self-published books, so let’s …
Secular Humanism: Protestantism’s Gift to Us All
The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, by Brad S. Gregory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-674-04563-7) 574 pp. Hardcover, $39.95. In the November 2012 issue of The Progressive, editor Matthew Rothschild opened his editorial by noticing what he took to be Paul Ryan’s “weird conception of rights,” …
How the New Testament Came to be Written
Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery, by Thomas L. Brodie (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012 ISBN978-1-907534-58-4) xv + 256 pp. Paperback, $29.95. Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery deserves attention because it is an honest and courageous statement of how the author has come, …