morality
This secular moment
No one ever said the Death of God would be easy.
When living kids become organ donors
Reading Time: 4 minutes The passage below, quoting “Anna,” the traumatized child protagonist in Jodi Picoult’s disquieting novel, My Sister’s Keeper, sets the messy table for this essay: My parents tried to make things normal, but that’s a relative term. The truth is, I was never really a kid. To be
The United States has an atonement problem
Reading Time: 6 minutes Throughout our history, but particularly since 2016, when Donald Trump first rode down that ill-fated escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential candidacy, it has grown ever clearer that Americans have a serious problem with atonement. We tend to run hellbent away
What might 100,000 more years of evolution do for the future of morality?
Reading Time: 2 minutes It was a bawdy planet for hundreds of millions of years; the whole of it reeked of sex without a whiff of morals in the air. Then, rather late in the day, a mere several thousand years ago, humans began offering moral codes recommending ‘licit’ sexual expression. But humans f
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