Oct 24 2011: Media Night MOVED TO NOV 28
Due to the preponderance of media night participants (including our host) who are going to the National Writers Series event with David Sedaris at the City Opera House on the 24th, and in the interest of allowing more time for more people to read this VERY IMPORTANT BOOK, we are moving our discussion of Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape to Monday, November 28. We look forward to a great discussion then!
Stephen Hawking, the most revered scientist since Einstein, is a formidable mathematician and a formidable salesman. “I want my books sold on airport bookstalls”, he has impishly declared, and he’s learned how to put them there.
Mr. Hawking’s Brief History of Time, published in 1988, sold some nine million copies. (A typical science best seller will move a tiny fraction of that number.) It did so partly by leaning on his preoccupying personal story. Mr. Hawking’s body has been wasted by Lou Gehrig’s disease, while his mind is utterly intact, a pinging black box amid the physical wreckage. It was no accident that Mr. Hawking’s wheelchair and elfin face appeared on that book’s cover a rarity for a book of serious intellect rather than on its back flap.
An atheist with a soul is in for a lot of soul-searching in MacArthur genius Goldstein’s rollicking latest. Cass Seltzer, a university professor specializing in the psychology of religion, hits the big time with a bestselling book and an offer to teach at Harvard quite a step up from his current position at Frankfurter University. While waiting for his girlfriend to return from a conference, Cass receives an unexpected visit from Roz Margolis, whom he dated 20 years earlier and who looks as good now as she ever did. Her secret: dedicating her substantial smarts to unlocking the secrets of immortality. Cass’s recent success and Roz’s sudden appearance send him into contemplation of the tumultuous events of his past, involving his former mentor, his failed first marriage and a young mathematical prodigy whose talent may go unrealized, culminating in a standing-room-only debate with a formidable opponent where Cass must reconcile his new, unfamiliar life with his experience of himself. Irreverent and witty, Goldstein seamlessly weaves philosophy into this lively and colorful chronicle of intellectual and emotional struggles.
Watch Steven Pinker Interview Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: A brief interview from Amazon.com.
Read the NY Times Review of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.
In his first book, Epstein (humanist chaplain, Harvard Univ.) ambitiously attempts to present humanism as a positive life stance that consists of much more than just the absence of belief in a deity by combining history, philosophy, inspiration, and personal confession and generously sprinkling literary, philosophical, and pop cultural illustrations throughout. Opposing the two extremes of the new atheism and religious fundamentalism, he carves a middle path alongside religious moderates. By focusing on ethics and action rather than theology and belief, Epstein’s vision is highly inclusive and emphasizes the vast common ground between the religious and nonreligious without diminishing or compromising the obvious differences. In this passionate collection of thoughts and ideas, he endeavors to educate the religious about the true nature of humanism and to inspire the nonreligious to consider constructively what they do believe rather than what they do not. …….., this is recommended for anyone interested in a positive and more tolerant contribution to the current God debate. Brian T. Sullivan, Alfred Univ. Lib., NY
Watch a short video promo with author Greg Epstein for Good Without God: What a Billion Non-Religious People Do Believe
Imagine, if you can, a novel that imbues pot roast, green beans and scalloped potatoes with Gnostic import not just evoking the aroma of Sundays past, with their old orderliness, aloof from all disruption, as in Marilynne Robinson’s last novel, Home, but embodying specific doctrinal precepts and divine mysteries. Reason recoils. Yet, in the philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s latest work of fiction, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, the rotund and orotund Jonas Elijah Klapper, the Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature and Values at Frankfurter University (think of Brandeis), proposes the traditional Jewish Sabbath meal of cholent (bean and potato stew) and kugel (pudding) to his overawed grad student, Cass Seltzer, as a worthy dissertation topic. And he’s not kidding. All of the dishes have kabbalist significance, he tells Seltzer. The tzaddikim, or righteous ones, proclaimed that there are profound matters enfolded in the kugel.
Klapper, a Jewish walrus in a shabby tweed jacket and the author of The Perversity of Persuasion, among other masterpieces, is given to staring upward as he orates, letting the riches of his prodigious memory spill forth. He is evidently a caricature of Harold Bloom or someone uncannily like him. He is also, Seltzer regretfully concludes, going off the deep end.
Only a year into his Ph.D. program, Seltzer watched his guru throw over Matthew Arnold for Yahweh, trading the ethereal embrace of academe for the meaty bear hug of his Hasidic brethren at America’s only shtetl, an upstate New York community called New Walden. Named for the town of Valden, in Hungary, New Walden happens to be the place where Seltzer’s mother grew up. She left the village and raised her family in a non-kosher, non-Sabbath-observing home, but Klapper persuades Seltzer to rekindle his Valdener ties and wrangle an invitation to a members-only feast at the rebbe’s table. It is after this memorable meal that Klapper orders his disciple to explore God’s indwelling immanence through the intriguing mystery of the kugel Seltzer balks. There’s no way I’m writing a dissertation on the hermeneutics of potato kugel he protests.
“A superb and convincing work.” –Malcolm Gladwell At a time when our planet is in dire peril, Americans mistrust science more than ever. Few journalists appreciate what is at stake better than Michael Specter, who has spent the last twenty years reporting on everything from the AIDS epidemic to the digital revolution. In Denialism, he eloquently shows how, in a world where protesters march against childhood vaccines and Africans starve to death rather than import genetically modified grains, we must reconnect with the rational thinking that has underpinned the advance of civilization since the eighteenth century. What emerges is a manifesto that brilliantly captures one of the pivotal clashes of our era.
New York Times Best Seller
Winner of the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction
The End of Faith provides a harrowing glimpse of mankind’s willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs, even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities. Harris argues that in the presence of weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely. Most controversially, he maintains that moderation in religion poses considerable dangers of its own: as the accommodation we have made to religious faith in our society now blinds us to the role that faith plays in perpetuating human conflict. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris draws on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism in an attempt to provide a truly modern foundation for our ethics and our search for spiritual experience.
The End of Faith articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated, almost personally understood. Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say in contemporary America. This is an important book, on a topic that, for all its inherent difficulty and divisiveness, should not be shielded from the crucible of human reason.
Natalie Angier, The New York Times Book Review
Hirsi Ali writes about her youth in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, about her flight to the Netherlands where she applied for political asylum, her university experience in Leiden, her work for the Labour Party, her transfer to the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, her election to Parliament, and the murder of Theo van Gogh, with whom she made the film Submission. The book ends with the controversy regarding her citizenship, which helped bring down the Dutch government.
There are many great books about finding God. But there are far fewer books, great or otherwise, about finding and then losing God. So Losing My Religion, by William Lobdell, a former religion writer for The Los Angeles Times, feels powerfully fresh. It is the tale of being born again in his adulthood, then almost 20 years later deciding that Christianity is untrue. Today Lobdell prefers the God of Jefferson or Einstein, a deity that can be seen in the miracles of nature. While Lobdell never entirely rejects belief in the supernatural, his humane, even-tempered book does more to advance the cause of irreligion than the bilious atheist tracts by Christopher Hitchens and others that have become so common. And Lobdell’s self-deprecating memoir is far more fun to read. ~ NY Times Book Review
First published in 1960, The Violent Bear It Away is now a landmark in American literature. It is a dark and absorbing example of the Gothic sensibility and bracing satirical voice that are united in Flannery O’Conner’s work. In it, the orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and his cousins, the schoolteacher Rayber, defy the prophecy of their dead uncle–that Tarwater will become a prophet and will baptize Rayber’s young son, Bishop. A series of struggles ensues: Tarwater fights an internal battle against his innate faith and the voices calling him to be a prophet while Rayber tries to draw Tarwater into a more “reasonable” modern world. Both wrestle with the legacy of their dead relatives and lay claim to Bishop’s soul.
O’Connor observes all this with an astonishing combination of irony and compassion, humor and pathos. The result is a novel whose range and depth reveal a brilliant and innovative writers acutely alert to where the sacred lives and to where it does not.