It is 'The Age of American Unreason' by Susan Jacoby...I haven't started it yet but it looks really interesting..and so does her other one 'Freethinkers'...

Anyone read these?

I am reading 'The God Delusion' again....I've been debating a lot lately and needed to get my brain in gear..lol

On another note...my DD (who is 9) asked if she could borrow Harris' 'Letter to a Christian Nation' ....She works at a 7th grade level, so she may be able to get most of it..since it is really easy to read...She'll ask if there is something she doesn't get...Anyway, I thought that was really neat...

Susan Jacoby wrote a book called Wild Justice that was very interesting.  I read it a long time ago, and am not sure it is still in my collection.  I'll have to check, but I remember her name with good connotations...

Anyway, hope you like it!

Candice, I am continuing to read The Age of American Unreason, and today, March 10th, I came to the chapter entitled "The New Old-time Religion".  When I read some statistics on "fundamentalists", "secularists", and "centrists", that the author included in this 2008 book, it made me recall a truism I first heard many years ago----"Today's minority is Tomorrow's majority."   (To me, that means that there is usually stout resistance to any change by most people, and the ranks are thin of  those 'thought leaders' who realize the validity of the new insights of the quest for deeper understanding of the universe.)

I'm impressed with the way Jacoby has organized a huge amount of research material, and added some scholarly thinking of her own, to delineate the account of the great rift in American thinking between fundamentalists (used here in the narrower sense of the word, and not in the careless generic way that includes all evangelicals) and what we can term "secularists".

I'm very glad I decided to look up this book, after reading an interview with its author.  I recommend it to participants in this Forum.