Author: Adam Lee

In my previous post on “Southern Slavery As It Was”, I cited two modern-day Christian pastors who claim that black slavery was a positive and beneficial institution. To throw some cold water on their rosy claims, in this post we’ll hear from a person with firsthand experience of it: Frederick Douglass, the great American abolitionist…

This weekend I saw Lincoln, which was a tremendous movie. Daniel Day-Lewis gives a compelling performance as President Abraham Lincoln during the closing days of the Civil War, when he battled with a fractious Congress to ratify the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which outlawed slavery permanently in the United States. Among the movie’s many…

Hemant Mehta has just published a new book, The Young Atheist’s Survival Guide. It’s about the growing and increasingly important demographic of atheist high schoolers – their trials and travails, the opposition and sometimes shocking persecution they’ve faced in their schools and their communities, and the hope they offer for the future of the secular…

The 2008 elections, in which pro-gay-marriage campaigners won a sweep at the ballot box, is a clear sign that the tide of society is shifting in favor of equality. We’ve known for a long time that this was coming, since the younger generations now replacing the older ones are overwhelmingly comfortable with equal rights. In…

[Editor’s Note: Please welcome guest blogger Andrew Tripp, author of Considered Exclamations and president and co-founder of the DePaul Alliance for Free Thought, a Secular Student Alliance and Center for Inquiry on Campus affiliate. I invited Andrew to write this post following a conversation we’ve been having intermittently, over Twitter, over e-mail and in person…

Ireland’s Catholic bishops have released an official statement on the death of Savita Halappanavar, to my surprise. It may well be that the outcry was so great, they felt obligated to respond. If so, it would be a rare instance of the church being swayed by external pressure. However, the statement itself doesn’t say anything…

My latest column has been posted on AlterNet, 50 Reasons to Boycott the Catholic Church. In it, as you might have guessed from the title, I list fifty arguments for why the Roman Catholic church is a thoroughly immoral organization and an enemy of progress. If this gets a good reception, I’ll write a sequel…

After several days, the fragile ceasefire in the latest iteration of Israel and Gaza’s endless war is still holding. But while the bombs were falling, there was no shortage of voices calling for the battle to be escalated even further, like Gilad Sharon, son of the former Israeli Prime Minister, who wrote in an op-ed:…

Some progressive Christian bloggers I respect have been writing enthusiastically about a new book, Rachel Held Evans’ A Year of Biblical Womanhood, which they say proves that the Bible has been misused to justify patriarchy and demands for female submission. When the book became a bestseller despite evangelical denunciation, they’ve seen it as proof that…

Earlier this week, I answered a set of “tough questions” posed to advocates of reproductive choice. Well, turnabout is fair play. Although millions of religious people want abortion to be outlawed, they’re surprisingly vague on the details. What exactly would their ideal society look like? How would they write the law and how would violators…