Description Based upon the author’s twenty years of classroom and clinical study, Slaves of Faith explores and explains the emotionally laden dynamic at work in the fundamentalist mind. As Dr. Mercer posits, the fundamentalist is fundamentally driven by anxiety layered over a fragile sense of self-identity constructed upon a system of beliefs that is both […]
An endlessly inspiring and instructive chronicle of the world’s great thinkers, from Aristotle to Santayana. Eleven years of research and three years of writing went into the creation of this work, which should appeal to the layman as well as educators.
Nine-year-old Prabir Suresh lives alone with his baby sister, Madhusree, and his biologist parents on a tropical Indonesian isle. Teranesia is so small and remote, it’s not on the maps, and its strange native species of butterfly remained undiscovered until the 21st century. Prabir never wants to leave, but war forces him to flee with […]
Charles Darwin’s Autobiography was first published in 1887, five years after his death. It was a bowdlerized edition: Darwin’s family, attempting to protect his posthumous reputation, had deleted all the passages they considered too personal or controversial. The present complete edition did not appear until 1959, one hundred years after the publication of The Origin […]
Subtitled: Where Orthodoxy Meets Heresy Shermer argues that science is the best lens through which to view the world, but he recognizes that it’s often difficult for most of us to tell where valid science leaves off and borderland science begins. To help us, Shermer looks at a range of topics that put the boundary […]
From the first rumblings of the Moral Majority over twenty years ago, the Christian Right has been marshalling its forces and maneuvering its troops in an effort to reshape the landscape of American politics. It has fascinated social scientists and journalists as the first right-wing social movement in postwar America to achieve significant political and […]
Can we grow old without dying? Why do we have to grow old at all? In this fascinating book Mark Benecke investigates the biological meaning of life and death and the prospects for extending human longevity, or even achieving immortality. The first section of the book discusses the biological fundamentals of why death exists and […]
In this philosophical essay, Beauvoir attempts to build an existential ethics on the universal basis of human freedom. Those interested in understanding Sartre would do well to read this book first since Beauvoir renders Sartre’s sometimes confusing technical terms in clear language.
Two brilliant young physicists, Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin, captured the attention of the world when they announced they had identified the five ages of time. But is it possible for us to know the complete life story of the universe from beginning to end? The astonishing truth is that recent study has defined the […]
The Heathen’s Guide to World Religions is the history they don’t teach in Sunday school. With a sharp wit and a flair for research, author William Hopper brings the world’s religions back down to earth, dissecting the traditional tales and exposing the treachery, deceit, and hilarity at the heart of the myths. The Heathen’s Guide […]
Just about everyone in the scientific community accepts the theory that our universe began in a “big bang” — but that theory leaves numerous unanswered questions about why the cosmos formed in just the manner we observe today. In The Inflationary Universe, physicist Alan Guth recounts his and others’ struggle to expound a theory that […]
Lee Smolin is not afraid to think big–really, really big. His theory of cosmic evolution by the natural selection of black-hole universes makes what we can experience into an infinitesimal, yet crucial, part of an ever-larger whole. Smolin says, “the new view of the universe is light, in all its senses, because what Darwin has […]
Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. But was he right? Can the quantum theory of fields and Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the two most accurate and successful theories in all of physics, be united in a single quantum theory of gravity? Can quantum and cosmos […]
The Gambler’s Fallacy, the Dirty Hands Argument, Wittgenstein’s Beetle in the Box–philosophical terms can be both intriguing and baffling. Now, eminent philosopher Simon Blackburn offers the most authoritative and up-to-date dictionary of philosophy available in a single volume. Nearly 3,000 entries cover everything from Aristotle to Zen. Line drawings.
Every academic, community, and freethought library needs one good text on the psychology of religion. The collaborative efforst of Hood, Spilka, Hunsberger, and Gorsuch have resulted in just such a comprehensive volume. The Psychology Of Religion covers the psychological nature and funcitions of religion, religion in childhood, religious socialization and thought in adolescence and young […]
Does science provide objective, impartial knowledge about nature and reality, or do social and cultural influences determine its course? Are scientific claims, practices, and theories contrary to religion? From creationists on the right to postmodernists on the left, intellectuals are waging war over the role and future of science in our society. In SCIENCE WARS […]
Subtitled “The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain,” Deacon’s book traces the origin of language back to the developmentof the human pair bond and shows how langugage propelled human brain evolution. Highly recommended!
God is dead. “Died and fell into the sea. ” That’s what Raphael, a despondent angel with luminous white wings and a blinking halo, tells Anthony Van Horne on his fiftieth birthday. Soon Van Horne is chared with captaining the supertanker Carpco Valparaiso (flying the colors of the Vatican) as it tows the two-mile-long corpse […]
Book Description The struggle for the soul of Europe today is every bit as dire and consequential as it was in the 1930s. Then, in Weimar, Germany, the center did not hold, and the light of civilization nearly went out. Today, the continent has entered yet another “Weimar moment.” Will Europeans rise to the challenge […]
One thousand years after the Jupiter mission to explore the mysterious Monolith had been destroyed, after Dave Bowman was transformed into the Star Child, Frank Poole drifted into space, frozen and forgotten, leaving the supercomputer HAL inoperable. But now Poole has returned to life, awakening in a world far different from the one he left […]
After the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke became perhaps the best known living Sci-Fi writer in the world. Using his inherent sense of humor and personal flair for adventure, Clarke combines the worlds of science and literature. The three award-winning stories in this volume take the listener into the realms of space adventure, […]
Since childhood, Ludovic Kennedy has questioned the existence of God, and he is not alone; at the end of the twentieth century, with 2000 years of Christian teaching behind us, the majority of the population no longer go to church. Now in ‘the most important book I have ever written’ he discusses how society has […]
The second volume of the spectacular science-fiction thriller evolving from the works of Arthur C.Clarke, grandmaster of science fiction and author of 2001: A Space Odyssey.. Her code name is Sparta. Her beauty veils a mysterious past and abilities of superhuman dimension-the product of advanced biotech engineering. When a team of scientists is trapped in […]
When did atheism first appear in America? Why did many of the Founding Fathers become deists? Are atheism and deism a threat to the Christian, Jewish, and Moslem religions? The book not only attempts to answer these questions, but also explores the influence of such philosophers as Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius and Voltaire on American leaders. […]
They were the men most trusted: Father Geoghan, Father Birmingham, Father Shanley, Father Trupia, and hundreds of others. They were the rulers of the Catholic Church: Cardinal Law, Cardinal Egan, Cardinal Mahony, and others. They had all taken vows to live by the gospel and to care for their parishioners. And they were believed. Now, […]
Book Description For all the thousands of books that have been written about religion, few until this one have attempted to examine it scientifically: to ask why–and how–it has shaped so many lives so strongly. Is religion a product of blind evolutionary instinct or rational choice? Is it truly the best way to live a […]
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