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Our selection of books and associated reviews. Each cover is an affiliate link to Amazon for purchase.
James Madison on Religious Liberty
This compelling volume offers selections from Madison’s writings and captures the character of his deep convictions regarding religious liberty.
Language, Logic and Experience
Does the word exist independently of our knowledge of it? Is there a real world “out there”? This has been one of philosophy’s central debates. This book is a vigorous attack on “the myth of realism”, and a carefully argued defense of the new form of anti-realism pioneered in the work of Michael Dummett. Luntley […]
Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist
Looking for a good introduction to atheism without all the technical philosophical jargon? Barker’s book is for you! As a former minister turned atheist, Dan Barker documents the arguments that “deconverted” him from Christian fundamentalist to atheist. Losing Faith in Faith is an arsenal for skeptics and a challenge to believers.
Mind Fields: The Art of Jacek Yerka, The Fiction of Harlan Ellison
A collection of fantastic short fiction by an award-winning author is complemented by richly detailed, surrealistic images from a renowned Polish painter. This unique volume is rich with the vivid imagery of one of our most inventive fantasy artists, published here for the first time, together with 30 original short stories from one of the […]
Nemesis
In the twenty-third century pioneers have escaped the crowded earth for life in self-sustaining orbital colonies. One of the colonies, Rotor, has broken away from the solar system to create its own renegade utopia around an unknown red star two light-years from Earth: a star named Nemesis. Now a fifteen-year-old Rotorian girl has learned of […]
On the Road
Kerouac’s novel On the Road ushered in the Beat Generation of 1950s America. Like Gide’s The Immoralist, Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical characters literally run from themselves in the doomed attempt to escape the realization of life’s absurdity. When the routinization of life is stripped away, revealing only the bare facticity of existence, different people react in many […]
Paul
Table of Contents Preface Chronological Table Introduction PART ONE: LIFE AND WORK Paul’s Descent and Environment before Conversion Paul’s Persecution of the Church and His Conversion and Call First Missionary Activity The Apostolic Assembly in Jerusalem The First Journey to Cyprus and Asia, and the Conflict at Antioch The World-wide Scope of the Pauline Mission […]
Psychology of Self Esteem (Abridged Audio Cassette)
Synopsis unavailable.
Religion and Morality
The authors explore different views on the relationship between religion and morality. They reject the claim that religion is incompatible with morality, but they also reject the claim that religion is necessary for morality. Highly recommended.
Roads to Dominion
A history of the American right wing since World War II. This book is a ‘must-have’ for anyone studying right wing group movements.
Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution
Concise yet powerful, Futuyma’s Science on Trial is yet another outstanding defense of biological evolution. It’s unlikely that creationists who want “both sides” taught in public schools want anyone reading this book, for it exposes creationism for the pseudoscientific nonsense it really is.
Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment
Book Description Before he began his recent travels, it seemed to Phil Zuckerman as if humans all over the globe were getting religion–praising deities, performing holy rites, and soberly defending the world from sin. But most residents of Denmark and Sweden, he found, don’t worship any god at all, don’t pray, and don’t give much […]
Suffering Belief
One of the most intractable problems for the contemporary Anglo-American theist is reconciling the enormous amount of apparent gratuitous suffering in the world with the existence of an all-perfect deity. Suffering Belief reviews the leading attempts at justifying the existence of evil and salvaging a rational basis of belief in the traditional Western God. Through […]
The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God
Book Description (Finalist, 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards, Science Category) You’ve probably seen it before: a human brain dramatically lit from the side, the camera circling it like a helicopter shot of Stonehenge, and a modulated baritone voice exalting the brain’s elegant design in reverent tones. To which this book says: Pure nonsense. In a […]
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
Rosemary and Peter Grant and those assisting them have spend twenty years on Daphne Major, an island in the Galapagos studying natural selection. They recognize each individual bird on the island, when there are four hundred at the time of the author’s visit, or when there are over a thousand. They have observed about twenty […]
The Brothers Karamozov
While Nietzsche was enormously influenced by Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, this nineteenth-century classic is widely regarded as the perennial work that marks the beginning of existential thought. This novel should be required reading for every serious thinker. Dostoevsky addresses themes such as self-loathing, rejection of freedom, rebellion against God, the problem of evil, the […]
The Columbia History of Western Philosophy
“The Columbia History of Western Philosophy is an excellent resource for surveying the history of philosophy. It is comprehensive not only in covering all the major thinkers from the Pre-Socratics to the present but also in surveying all of the main elements of the contributions of various thinkers. Its discussion of continental philosophy in the […]
The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think and Communicate
From biology to culture to the new new economy, the buzzword on everyone’s lips is “meme.” How do animals learn things? How does human culture evolve? How does viral marketing work? The answer to these disparate questions and even to what is the nature of thought itself is, simply, the meme. For decades researchers have […]
The Existential Jesus
Description Upending Christianity’s popular notion of Jesus the comforter, the good shepherd, the Lord, and the Savior, this completely new exploration of Mark’s Life of Jesus reexamines the image presented in this earliest of the New Testament gospels–the mysterious stranger, the singular, abandoned, and solitary figure–and rethinks the current role of Western culture through a […]
The Fundamentals of Extremism (Hardcover)
On September 11, 2001, Americans witnessed horrific carnage inspired by religious extremism. We saw that religious fundamentalists will stop at nothing to reign terror on those they regard as their enemies. In our response, we began to focus on the oppressive treatment of women and children in other parts of the world where religious fundamentalism […]
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Live In Concert (Abridged Audio Cassette)
Don’t leave Earth without this hilarious international bestseller about the end of the world and the happy-go-lucky days that follow. Join the gruesome two-some of Arthur Dent and his friend, Ford Perfect, in their now-famous intergalactic journey through time and space.
The Jesus Mysteries: Was the ‘Original Jesus’ a Pagan God?
According to the book itself: “What if for thousands of years before Christianity Pagans had also worshipped a Son of God? What if this Pagan saviour was also born of a virgin on the 25th of December before three shepherds, turned water into wine, died and resurrected at Easter, and offered his body and blood […]
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Sequel to Holistic Detective Agency. After a Heathrow Airport ticket counter explodes, intergalactic sleuth Dirk Gently finds himself up against a heavenly host of foes–from the IRA to the Norse Gods. When a passenger check-in desk at London’s Heathrow Airport disappears in a ball of orange flame, the explosion is deemed an act of God. […]
The Miracle of Theism
This (posthumous) volume contains a comprehensive review of the principal arguments for and against the existence of God. It ranges from the classical philosophical positions of Descartes, Anselm, Berkeley, Hume et al., through the moral arguments of Newman, Kant and Sidgwick, to the recent restatements of the classical theses by Plantinga and Swinburne. It also […]
The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism
Writen long before “Day 9-11,” this book explores in depth the new terrorist movement that the United States has now declared war against. In the shock and horror of the recent attack, the prior (and less successful) 1993 attack goes largely unmentioned. However, as the evidence mounts that the recent attack was sponsored by the […]
The Philosophical and Theological Foundations of Ethics
Contains chapters on (among other things) the nature and objectivity of morality, morality without religion, and morality with religion. The book is written at an intermediate level, so that it is accessible to laymen but there is plenty of meat for the scholar as well. Anyone interested in the relationship between religion and morality will […]
The Quest for the Historical Muhammad
More than one hundred years ago Western scholars began to investigate the origins of Islam, using the highest standards of objective historical scholarship of the time. Their aim was to determine what could be known about Muhammad and the rise of early Islam quite apart from the pious and totally unobjective traditions preserved by the […]
The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life
Book Description The open, secular society is in retreat. From Washington to Rome to Tehran, religion is a public matter as never before, and secular values–personal autonomy, toleration, separation of religion and state, and freedom of conscience–are attacked on all sides and defended by few. The godly claim a monopoly on the language of morality […]
The Trial of God : A Play
Set in a medieval European village where three itinerant Jewish actors put God on trial to answer for His silence during a pogrom, a powerful drama considers historical and especially post-Holocaust issues surrounding faith. While interred in Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel witnessed a trial. While such things are not unusual, this trial was. It was unusual […]
The Wasp Factory
‘Meet Frank Cauldhame. Just sixteen, and unconventional to say the least: “Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That’s […]
