After a long hiatus, NOSHA teamed up with the Department of Anthropology at Tulane University under the direction of NOSHA Vice President and Tulane Adjunct Instructor Jim Dugan to return the annual tribute to the work and legacy of Charles Darwin to the Tulane campus this year. Each year similar gatherings take place virtually worldwide, with most organizers using Darwin’s birthday, February 12, as the date to plan around. In New Orleans, the timing more often than not conflicts with […]

During our January meeting for NOSHA,  member John Patrick Lestrade, Ph.D., did a reading that we’d like to share for everyone who couldn’t attend that day. Please enjoy!   We all know that there are basically two types of eclipses: The lunar eclipse, when the Moon is behind the Earth and slips into the Earth’s dark shadow, and the better known solar eclipse, when the Moon blocks the Sun from our view. I thought that you might enjoy an intellectual gem […]

The Board of Directors would like to bring back our quarterly newsletter, so we’re asking for volunteers who might be able to do this as a service to NOSHA. We’re happy to report that we have at least one person who is willing to work on content, which can be the most daunting task when creating pages as anyone who has ever done a newsletter can often attest! So, we really need a volunteer who can use a graphics program […]

“Pray it away”, indeed; that was but a part of the orchestrated chant put together by the organizers of the “Organize, Reflect, Act: A Day of Action for Justice in Louisiana”, a protest on the LSU campus Saturday against the unholy union of the churchy fundamentalist group the American Family Association and state chief executive Bobby Jindal.  Arriving about thirty minutes early, I was concerned that the turnout was not going to be as strong as hoped; there were only […]

There was a thread in our Facebook group recently that elevated the apparent (and possible lack of) understanding of who non-believers are in the political spectrum of thought. It seemed that not everyone realized that “we” all don’t believe the same way, whether we label ourselves atheists, secular humanists, freethinkers or whatever. On top of that, some people may have misconceptions about the non-religious because of their own limited awareness or lack of experience, especially if they have only recently […]

    At our 15th year anniversary banquet in November 2014, we awarded Farrar Hudkins with our Greenberger Humanist Award. President Emeritus Harry Greenberger, for whom the award is named, read Hudkins’ statement of acceptance to the audience. We felt that everyone should be able to enjoy it whether you attended the banquet or not. It is a lovely note on which to end our year!       “I’m tremendously humbled, honored, and really amazed, by this award. My […]

I recently volunteered to do gift wrapping for holiday shoppers at a major chain bookstore in Metairie. This was mostly a pleasant experience, and an opportunity to make NOSHA visible and even to collect a few dollars in donations. Occasionally, someone would say they wouldn’t donate to our group, and I always said that was entirely up to them. Everybody who came to the table got their gift wrapped.   One shopper, though, voiced some negative opinions. He photographed me […]

Fifteen years…   Chances are that not many would have given a small band of atheists with a liberal social agenda much hope to last very long as a functioning organization in a city with a strong, 300 year-old Catholic tradition, or in a state situated nearly in the center of the Protestant Bible Belt spanning the southern United States. This would have to have been a pipe dream that wafted away quicker than the pungent smoke they were sharing, right?   Well, wrong. […]