A skeptic's quest for books, science, & humanism
If I could summarize Andrew Seidel’s new book American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom in one word, I would say it is difficult. At times it is difficult to comprehend due to legal jargon (even after the author purposely trimmed the fat, so to speak) but it is immensely difficult to stomach. This was a book I had to read slowly and take plenty of breaks from. It wasn’t a fun book, and it wasn’t intended to be.
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Since its release in June 2020, Kristin Kobes du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation has been required reading for anyone seeking to gain a full perspective on the Christian Nationalist movement in the United States and how it got this way.
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Let’s be clear: a Christian Nationalist is not a person you want to be. But leave it to Christian Nationalists to embrace Christian Nationalism, and to make it look like the right thing to do.
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Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity, and How the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World by David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu is one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read.
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There is no question more tempting to the historian of science than the age-old “When did science begin?” The most popular answer to this question has to be “Ancient Greece!” It was Carl Sagan’s answer, and it was Simon Singh’s. This week, I found that it was also Andrew Gregory’s answer.
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If there is one good thing that has come out of the fight for abortion rights this year, it is that there are so many great books coming out which tell the story from every angle. Published in April 2022, Lauren Rankin’s Bodies on the Line: At the Front Lines of the Fight to Protect Abortion in America is the go-to book to learn about the unsung heroes of the abortion access movement: clinic escorts.
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In the last month, we have heard countless Republicans and anti-abortion advocates trying to use the recent uptick in vandalism against crisis pregnancy centers as proof that the pro-abortion side is the side of violence. James Risen and Judy Thomas’s 1998 book Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War blows that entire argument out of the water.
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Read moreAll his life, Carl Sagan was troubled by grand dichotomies—between reason and irrationalism, between wonder and skepticism. The dichotomies clashed within him.
. . . In the final analysis, he was the dichotomy: the prophet and the hard-boiled skeptic, the boyish fantasist and the ultrarigorous analyst, the warm companion and the brusque colleague, the oracle whose smooth exterior concealed inner fissures, which, in the end, only one woman would heal.
Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A life, p. 1
Everyone knows that access to abortion is a critical human rights issue. The potential overturning of Roe v. Wade is more than unconstitutional, it’s inhumane. An unjust human rights violation. But the worst part? As many activists have said, it’s the floor, not the ceiling, of reproductive justice. That’s where Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger’s Reproductive Justice: An Introduction becomes crucial to understanding what that ceiling might look like.
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I have made a horrible mistake.
I allowed Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh to sit on my bookshelf for three and a half years, unread. After finally reading this thrilling, enlightening, and entertaining book, I now know that all these years I was missing something great. And holographic.
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