Reading Time: 5 minutes For religious/nonreligious couples, baptism is often the first challenging decision. The nonreligious partner often rationalizes that there’s no magic involved—”it’s just a bath,” as one dad said to me—and agrees to the ceremony. But there’s much more to consider.
Parenting & Family
Exploring the world of family and parenting from a secular, nonreligious perspective.
Posted inParenting & Family
Teach your kids about propaganda, or someone else will
Reading Time: 6 minutes Keeping kids isolated from viewpoints you disagree with is a parenting strategy that never works. A better one is to teach them how to recognize propaganda and toxic memes when they see them.
Posted inPsychology
The art of losing yourself
Reading Time: 3 minutes According to creativity researcher Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, when you’re lost in an all-consuming activity, you don’t have enough attention left over to notice that you exist. Welcome to the flow state.
Posted inParenting & Family
How my kids met me one age at a time
Reading Time: 4 minutes “Twenty-eight!” “Twenty-eight…oh, that’s a good one.” Despite living with him for 13 years, I knew very little about my dad. He worked three jobs and traveled a lot. When he was in town, he came home exhausted from a hundred-mile round-trip commute. I didn’t even know he was a nonbeliever until long after his death […]
Posted inParenting & Family
When evolution is a bad word
Reading Time: 6 minutes (Part 1 | Part 3) Quick recap. My 9-year-old daughter won a national Evolution and Art contest. Her school’s assistant principal, Ms. Warner, said the principal would interview her about it on the school’s morning news program. But they wouldn’t be calling it an Evolution and Art contest, just an “Art” contest – because evolution […]
Posted inParenting & Family
Different out loud
Reading Time: 6 minutes Most conformity studies are depressing on the surface. But they also show that if a group is embarking on a bad course of action, one dissenter is often enough to turn it around.
Posted inEducation
Why we need public school: Pluralism is how progress happens
Reading Time: 4 minutes [Previous: What rights do parents have over their children’s education?] The battle over public schools is a clash of values. There’s no such thing as neutral or value-free education. Every choice about what to present or what to omit from the classroom carries ideological weight. That’s why red-state politicians want to present one version of […]
Posted inParenting & Family
What rights do parents have over their children’s education?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Religious conservatives want to impose heavy-handed censorship on public schools. We should reject this, but how much control should parents have over what is taught?
Posted inFilm/TV
‘Hilda’ captures the magic and wonder of childhood
Reading Time: 3 minutes The rare kids’ show that hits the trifecta: it’s gorgeous but has rich depths of story, imaginative yet grounded, and handles heavy themes deftly.
Posted inLeaving Religion
Not so much better angels: Celebrating with the ghosts of Christmas past
Reading Time: 3 minutes Despite Catholicism lurking in the background, Christmas was a magical time when I was a kid. Jesus was watching but from a respectful distance. Even when my old aunties came to visit, he kept quiet. Well mostly. He apparently insisted we give him thanks for our meals and upper-middle-class lifestyle in sunny 1980s Southern California. […]