Elliott Sober, "The Design Argument" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
The story goes: you are walking in the woods and see a wrist-watch on the ground; you don’t know how it got there or why it has come to be abandoned here, but you can surmise that someone somewhere de...
28 Jan 201940min
Victoria Smolkin, "A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism" (Princeton UP, 2018)
The specter of the “Godless” Soviet Union haunted the United States and continental Western Europe throughout the Cold War, but what did atheism mean in the Soviet Union? What was its relationship wit...
11 Dec 20181h 1min
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-Fi...
6 Dec 20181h 1min
David P. Barash, “Through a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are” (Oxford UP, 2018)
Human beings have long seen themselves as the center of the universe, as specially-created creatures who are anointed as above and beyond the natural world. Professor and noted scientist David P. Bara...
13 Nov 20181h 20min
Stephen Batchelor, “Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World” (Yale UP, 2017)
As the practice of mindfulness permeates mainstream Western culture, more and more people are engaging in a traditional form of Buddhist meditation. However, many of these people have little interest ...
22 Okt 20181h 8min
Larry Shapiro, “The Miracle Myth: Why Belief in the Resurrection and the Supernatural Is Unjustified” (Columbia UP, 2016)
There are many who believe Moses parted the Red Sea and Jesus came back from the dead. Others are certain that exorcisms occur, ghosts haunt attics, and the blessed can cure the terminally ill. Though...
26 Sep 201858min
Leigh Eric Schmidt, “Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in A Godly Nation” (Princeton UP, 2016)
A much-maligned minority throughout American history, atheists have been cast as a threat to the nation’s moral fabric, barred from holding public office, and branded as irreligious misfits in a natio...
7 Sep 20181h 4min
Steven and Ben Nadler, “Heretics!: The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy” (Princeton UP, 2017)
This entertaining, enlightening, and humorous graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority and contemporary thinking—sometimes risking excomm...
23 Juli 20181h 7min
