Elizabeth M. Sanders, “Genres of Doubt: Science Fiction, Fantasy and the Crisis of Victorian Faith” (McFarland, 2017)
The Victorians left an indelible stamp on culture that continues to be in evidence today, not least of which is their refinement of the realist fiction medium known as the novel and their innovations,...
12 Jul 20181h 16min
Duncan Pritchard, “Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing” (Princeton UP, 2015)
How certain can you be that you’re actually sitting at your desk when it seems that you are? You might see your desk before you and feel it beneath your arms and yet, how can you prove that your sense...
18 Jun 201855min
Joseph O. Baker and Buster G. Smith, “American Secularism: Cultural Contours of Nonreligious Belief” (NYU Press, 2015)
A rapidly growing number of Americans are embracing life outside the bounds of organized religion. Although the United States has long been viewed as a fervently religious Christian nation, survey dat...
23 Mai 201855min
Bonnie Anderson, “The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer” (Oxford UP, 2017)
As a believer in free thought, a campaigner for women’s rights, and as a supporter of abolition, Ernestine Rose had no shortage of causes to advocate. In The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, ...
26 Mar 201845min
Michael Shermer, “Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia” (Henry Holt, 2018)
For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, and though no one has ever returned from such a place to report what it is really like—or that it even exis...
20 Feb 201853min
Michael Ruse, “On Purpose” (Princeton UP, 2017)
Can we live without the idea of purpose? Should we even try to? Immanuel Kant thought we were stuck with purpose, and while Darwin’s theory of natural selection profoundly shook the idea, it was unabl...
12 Feb 201855min
Dan Barker, “God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction” (Sterling, 2016)
For those of us who pay close attention in Sunday school, a troubling dissimilarity may begin to appear between what we are told of God’s personality and what we learn of it from His actions. For exam...
30 Des 20171h 6min
Abby Hafer, “The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not” (Cascade Books, 2015)
Have you ever asked yourself why humans have an appendix that will sometimes explode and kill us? Why do men’s testicles hang outside the body where theyre arguably awkward and vulnerable? And if ther...
25 Nov 20171h 27min
