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Journey into a future shaped by creativity, critical thought, and secular habits of mind. Help shape what’s next!
Strange New Worlds: Star Trek’s return to humanist form
Reading Time: 9 minutes I almost didn’t watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which started airing this month. I’m glad I did: it’s deservedly being called the best of the recent Treks, and there’s a lot to be said about this series as a humanist. I had reason to be reluctant. The franchise hasn’t be
Between massacres: a uniquely American horror show in seven acts
Reading Time: 7 minutes A shooter enters a building in an American city and takes innocent lives. The name of the shooter is insignificant, while their race and gender are both significant and mostly predictable. The city is Buffalo, or Uvalde, or East Lansing, or Monterey Park, or a hundred others.
Grove City College’s anti-‘woke’ report contradicts its stated Christian values
Reading Time: 14 minutes Grove City College is your typical conservative Christian college, but I’m not your typical alumna. Unlike my fellow students, I’m an atheist, and I formed this identity inside Grove City’s faith-based Pennsylvania bubble. Since graduating in May of 2018, I’ve done my best t
On Earth Day, reasons for climate optimism
The world is really and truly flattening the curve of climate change. Although we can’t stop global warming entirely, we still have a chance to mitigate its effects.
Dying out loud
A terminal ALS diagnosis led Dave Warnock to a question: Would he spend his remaining time trying to stay alive, or living?
Why did the color violet go viral after 1863?
Allen Tager has spent the new millennium thus far trying to find out why the color violet is so difficult to find through thousands of years of human history—until suddenly it was everywhere.
Adam and Steve: Queer artists repurpose Genesis as a gay love story
By “queering” Genesis with their music, Dorian Electra and Lil Nas X repurposed the Adam and Eve dynamic, turning it into a gay love story.
Why degrowth is (still) wrong
Reading Time: 6 minutes Earlier this month, I wrote an essay against degrowth, the position that drastic reductions to the modern lifestyle are our only hope of saving the planet. I argued that, to the contrary, renewable energy promises a future of greater abundance even as we tread more lightly on
Heat pumps will bring secular victory
Reading Time: 3 minutes Fossil fuels pay for Vladimir Putin’s war. The oil and gas that Europe buys from Russia become the bombs and missiles falling on Ukraine. If we had a way to break this dependence, if Europeans no longer relied on Russian gas to heat their homes, we could choke off Putin’s rev
Could there ever be a Black Trump?
Reading Time: 3 minutes We’re living through a period of rising authoritarianism in US politics. The January 6th Capitol riot was not an isolated incident but a culmination of conservative extremism. Former President Donald Trump regularly flouted political norms and pushed his base toward what were
Why degrowth is wrong
Reading Time: 4 minutes Americans are obsessed with bigness. We build bigger and bigger houses. We drive bigger and bigger cars. We even eat bigger portions and consume more calories than anyone else, including more meat, the most resource-intensive of foods. In short, we idolize excess. We’re the r
Christian nationalism in 2022: An interview with Katherine Stewart
Reading Time: 9 minutes Religious freedom advocate Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, has been writing about politics, policy, education, and church-state relations for over a decade. The Power Worshippers won first place in the Ex
