Reading Time: 6 minutes New research from the Pew Center points to the powerful potential of secularism as an avenue for forging multiracial coalitions.
Black Lives Matter
Posted inEducation
Bishop revokes “Catholic” title from school over its BLM and Pride flags
Reading Time: 3 minutes What does it mean to be Catholic? You might say attending Mass, confessing your sins, receiving the sacrament, and other Precepts. If you read the news, you might even say being Catholic now requires you to oppose abortion as well as LGBTQ rights, given how many Democratic politicians and Catholic educators have been punished for […]
Posted inReligious News
‘I’ll Will Smith them in a heartbeat’: slap-happy evangelist hands extremists a brand-new synonym
Reading Time: 3 minutes Addressing a crowd of right-wing knuckleheads at a ReAwaken America rally in Keizer, Oregon, on April Fool’s Day, Mark Burns, delivered a “don’t turn the other cheek” message to his audience, saying he’d happily “Will Smith” Antifa and Black Lives Matter” and “put one of them to sleep.” Burns, who in 2016 lied about his […]
Posted inEducation
Supporting Black teachers under siege
Reading Time: 4 minutes Generations after Black secularist historian and scholar Carter G. Woodson founded what was initially dubbed “Negro History Week,” the continued struggle for Black self-determination in education is an indictment of American democracy. In his new book Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, Harvard professor Jarvis Givens argues that “teaching and […]
Posted inRacial justice
Did too-blind justice free Kyle Rittenhouse?
Reading Time: 4 minutes FYI to my readers: My OnlySky essays are always informed by secularism, nontheism and humanism but do not always focus on patently irreligious themes. My essential aim is to investigate our world from the perspective that gods are nonexistent. Blind justice, it turns out, can be too blind. Take, for instance, then 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, […]
Posted inPolitics
Why the George Floyd protests mattered
Reading Time: 2 minutes After George Floyd was murdered by former police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, protests erupted across the United States. The protests were among the largest in U.S. history, with The New York Times estimating that between 15 and 26 million Americans participated. The size and scope of the protests shocked observers, as it came in […]
Posted inGeneral
White Privilege Makes Some Uncomfortable
Reading Time: 2 minutes By James A. Haught Years ago, I visited our state’s former black mental hospital and fell into conversation with a witty, friendly, black psychiatrist. He taunted me: “You’re a racist, you know.” “No, no, no,” I protested — but he continued: “Just look at yourself. You were born white, male and smart. You could go […]
Posted inReligion
The Truth About Christianity
Reading Time: 11 minutes Hi and welcome back! As many people do now, I feel disquiet and dread when I check out what Christians are doing lately. And I’m not just talking about the obvious ones shooting protesters and screeching about their worship of Donald Trump. To me, the range of behavior we see in Christians reflects the cardinal […]
Posted inGeneral
On Defunding Police
Reading Time: 6 minutes We can invest in communities instead of repressing them, which will lead to less crime, less social dysfunction, and less need for police in the long run.
Posted inGeneral
Atheists Stand Against Racism
Reading Time: 5 minutes America is on the cusp of change, and atheists and agnostics are on the leading edge.