I have Secularist’s Anxiety (SA). It is not a medical or psychological condition, but one I made up to explain an effect a trend of national events that are possible forebodings of difficult times ahead for we who are serious about living and teaching secularism. Maybe I should call it secular jitters. Much of what I relate to in this opinion piece is probably familiar to all readers here, and quite recently published. But I believe listing…

Margaret Atwood’s latest (September 2019) novel is The Testaments, a sequel to her bestseller, The Handmaid’s Tale. Both stories are told from the perspectives of women living in Gilead, a women-oppressing theocracy that overtakes the United States by revolution, then becomes mired in the many difficulties that inevitably arise when religious institutions have worldly power.  The Testaments gives us three very different first-person perspectives on the beginning of the end of Gilead. One narrator is a young woman who grew…

    The increasing influence of the Muslim presence in the Western Hemisphere has been reshaping the sociopolitical structure which has reached a tipping point. The problem started back during the eighties when multiculturalism became a consumable identity in many countries across Europe and was heavily promoted with the rise of globalism. The eighties also ushered in a significant historical period with the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. By then, the scars of…

It would be difficult to deny that many of our fellow humans have experienced a mental state in reaction to an event external to themselves that they would classify, for lack of another term, as spiritual. (It would be equally difficult to overlook that the word, and its derivation spirituality, are often overused, or exaggerate the actual mental state the user experiences—remember what happened to “awesome”?) But what is a spiritual experience, anyway? This mental state may also be described…