Some 400 miles southwest of Timbuktu—a place which may stir the imagination and conjure up a fantasy of a mystical, unknown and remote place somewhere at the Earth’s end—is Bamako, the capital of Mali in western Africa. The large, linear semi-arid geographical area the width Africa known as the Sahel, just south of the Great Sahara desert where Bamako lies would itself seem  faraway and exotically foreign to many in North America. Even with a population of about 2.5 million,…

            Writing in NOSHA News fifteen years ago this month, Connie Gordon Schultz marked  the occasion of the first meeting of the “revived and reconstituted” New Orleans Secular Humanist Association after the crushing devastation Hurricane Katrina bore on the city, and perhaps prophetically, but certainly welcomed, the reunification was just in time for the group’s  annual winter solstice celebration December 18, 2005. About 30 members, some of which are shown in the photo, attended and…

The modern humanist tradition, both secular and religious, appears to have escaped a serious threat to its progress, perhaps even its survival with the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 election for President. Trump’s incompetence as a leader and lack of inspiration as a visionary, coupled with his keen but bungling aptitude for authoritarian, anti-democratic, and demagogic persuasion and control, and his divisive rhetoric, mendacity, and self-dealing corruption  would have given him, had he won, free reign to further…

The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis was just a symptom of a problem that America has and was one of many signals of how America has changed and how dangerous the resistance to that change has become. The dangerous part? The American right is showing increasing signs of tolerating authoritarianism with the involvement of police and federal officers to shut down all demonstrations that were the biggest since the Civil Rights Movement in 1964.    The Republican party has…