Books

American Infidel: Robert Ingersoll Was the “Great Agnostic” of the (Last) Gilded Age

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My grandfather, born to immigrants in 1878, was undoubtedly familiar with the all-but-forgotten figure of Robert Green Ingersoll, the “Great Agnostic,” who popularized Darwin for the millions, who championed the disgraced Thomas Paine, and who kept alive the important tradition of American free thought during the last quarter of the 19th century. 

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Islam, Essential to America?

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This book is my own effort to equip myself to talk about and engage with the nation’s fastest growing religion, to offer a snapshot of one of its most influential institutions, and to tell the stories of the students and scholars who have taken up the challenge of this experiment in American education.

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God Will Not Make You Straight: An Interview with GCN’s Justin Lee

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“We really need to get rid of Ex-Gay groups. I would like to see Christians, en masse, abandon these groups, to recognize that they don’t work. If they want to help people be celibate because that’s what they believe people are called to do, more power to them, but to tell people they can become straight and torture them psychologically is incredibly wrong.”

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Spiritual-Not-Religious or Just Lazy?

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The folks most likely to be alienated by Daniel’s book are, unsurprisingly, the seekers—those who call themselves SBNR, of course, but also those who want religious community, or at least want to want it. For these folks, who may be, as she says, “shopping” for a place to belong, Daniel has absolutely no patience.

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