Journalist Susan Jacoby, philosopher Colin McGinn, and theologian Denys Turner explore questions such as: Is humanism another kind of religion? Is it religion's evolutionary future, rather than just one of several alternatives? What light does the recent scientific study of religion throw on these possibilities?
How do the new humanists compare to the new atheists? Can an atheist identity be shaped by a positive ethic, or must it be primarily an anti-religious sentiment? How will the persistence of belief and disbelief, as well as the tension between them, shape thought and culture in the 21st century?
Bio
Susan Jacoby
Susan Jacoby is the author of Never Say Die and The Age of American Unreason. She began her writing career as a reporter for The Washington Post, and has been a contributor to a wide range of periodicals and newspapers for more than 25 years on topics including law, religion, medicine, aging, women's rights, political dissent in the Soviet Union and Russian literature.
Jacoby has been the recipient of grants from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2001-2002, she was named a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Jacoby's other books include Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004); Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1984, and Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past.
William P. Kelly
William P. Kelly was appointed president of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on July 1, 2005. From 1998 through June 2005, he served as the Graduate Center's provost and senior vice president, a tenure that was marked by the recruitment of a remarkable cadre of internationally renowned scholars to the school's faculty.
A distinguished American literature scholar and an expert on the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Dr. Kelly's books include Plotting America's Past: Fenimore Cooper and the Leatherstocking Tales (Southern Illinois University Press), and a work in progress, Exhibiting Nature: Scientific Culture and The American Museum of Natural History.
His numerous articles and reviews have appeared in a broad range of publications including the New York Times Book Review, The American Scholar, and the Journal of Western History, and he is the editor of the Random House edition of The Selected Works of Washington Irving and the Oxford University Press edition of The Pathfinder.
Dr. Kelly graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1971, where he won the David Bowers Prize in American Studies. He was named Outstanding Graduate Student in English at Indiana University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1976. Dr. Kelly also holds a diploma in intellectual history from Cambridge University and in 1980 received a Fulbright Fellowship to France, where he subsequently became visiting professor at the University of Paris.
He was also executive director of the CUNY/Paris Exchange Program and, in 2003, was named Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques by the French Ministry of Education in recognition of his contributions to Franco-American educational and cultural relations.
Colin McGinn
Colin McGinn (B.Phil., Oxford University), joined the University of Miami Philosophy Department in 2006, having taught previously at University of London, University of Oxford, and Rutgers University. He was the recipient of the John Locke Prize at Oxford University in 1973. His research interests are in philosophy of mind (particularly consciousness, intentionality and imagination), metaphysics, ethics and philosophical logic.
He has published many articles, and is the author of 20 books, including Mental Content (Blackwell, 1989), The Problem of Consciousness (Blackwell, 1991), The Character of Mind (Oxford 1997), Ethics, Evil and Fiction (Oxford 1997), The Mysterious Flame (Basic Books, 1999), Logical Properties (Oxford 2000), Consciousness and Its Objects (Oxford, 2004), Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning (Harvard, 2004), and Shakespeare's Philosophy (Harper, 2006).
Gustav Niebuhr
Gustav Niebuhr is an associate professor of Religion and the Media, director of the Religion and Society Program, director of the Carnegie Religion and Media Minor, and co-director of the Luce Project in Religion, Media, and International Relations at Syracuse University.
Over a twenty-year career in journalism, most recently at the New York Times and, prior to that, at the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlanta Journal/Constitution, Gustav Niebuhr has established a reputation as a leading writer about American religion. He is a frequent guest blogger on the Washington Post's "On Faith" column, and he also does occasional commentaries on religion for the National Public Radio program "All Things Considered."
His most recent book, Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America, will be published in August.
Denys Turner
Denys Alan Turner is a British academic in the field of philosophy and theology. He is currently Professor of Historical Theology at Yale University having been appointed in 2005, previously having been Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from Oxford University.
He has written widely on political theory and social theory in relation to Christian theology, as well as on Medieval thought, in particular, mystical theology.
Any belief, method, or philosophy that has a central emphasis on the human realm. The term is most commonly applied to the cultural movement in Renaissance Europe characterized by a revival of Classical letters, an individualistic and critical spirit, and a shift of emphasis from religious to secular concerns. This movement dates to the 13th century and the work of the Florentine scholar-statesman Brunetto Latini. Its diffusion was facilitated by the publication of Classical ideas, both in the vernacular and in Latin.
This is a great discussion, though I could have done without the obnoxious presence of Susan Jacoby. I don't know if it's typical of her conversational style, but it seemed as though her goal was to shout down a good deal of what was said.
I have never heard even a marginally good argument for the existence of a deity. I can understand people's cultural and emotional affection for these beliefs, but I don't think you can make any rational case for it.
I'm always completely baffled by believers and the faithful of any kind... including nationalism and patriotism, which seem to me like a secular kind of faith revloving around the worship of one's state... any thoughts on that?
What is this about the conversation being over-laiden with semantics (directed mostly at 'ethorson' and 'chris tapp')? Hello, people: the discussion is on non-belief. Of course the discussion is going to be unusually inundated with semantics, meanings or definitions because before it can be "discussed" it has to be defined. We can't always assume that the audience is on your "advanced" level of understanding. Hrmph.
I agree with ethorson in that this was a waste of the available talent on stage; they seemed to spend a lot of time discussing semantics and being polite, and not really generating any light.
I disagree about the loss of self idea though. As I gather from your description this is a theological issue and so is of no interest to me as an atheist.
The "loss of self" is the result of "Original Sin". The concept of "original sin" is that when mankind became a creature of ego (the apple of knowledge) and then valued self (became aware of nakedness) above God then the "gift" of death was bestowed by God upon mankind.
This loss of self because of anticipation of death is the core problem for mankind. The fear of that loss leads humans to invent procedures (rites, ceremonies, readings etc...) that will remove the fear. Belief is the glue that holds this together. I would have liked to hear this group expound on this theme. I would have liked to hear how Eastern religions, especially Buddism handles this problem.
The discussion of these type of "core" ideas, interest me. There was a lot of wasted brainpower in this discussion, in my opinion.
Agh! How dare you defame the great Sagan like that! :-P
It was Stephen Jay Gould who (wrongly, IMO) popularized the phrase "non-overlapping magisteria"! Not Sagan! Now say 30 "Hail Sagans" and re-watch "Cosmos" 3 times... :-P
Dr. Turner is mistaken about Richard Dawkins' views. In "The God Delusion" he makes it quite clear that he would never be so presumptuous as to claim that there is no God. He lays out a sort of scale from 1 to 7 wherein 7 is to claim that there is no God. Dawkins considers himself a 6.
I found this discussion interesting but I was frustrated because they seemed to be discussing the meaning of words such as atheism, anti-theism, sacred and secular. I found it interesting that theists are almost always atheistic about God(s) other than their own. For example, christian fundamentalists are atheistic about the Hindu gods. Another interesting issue was that people seem to like powerful gods better than weak gods. So gods who are powerful are more attractive to people. Also interesting was the issue of morality and whether god was necessary for morality to exist. It seems that the group skirted the issue and sort of agreed that "common sense" created morality. I thought that morality prepares one to understand god rather than morality being dictated by god was interesting but it was unexplored. I would have like to have heard this group discuss the relationship of social uncertainty and fundamentalism. Also I would have liked to hear discussion about how fear of "loss of self" is related to the concept of original sin. It was a somewhat waste of brainpower and I have to fault the questions, not the panel.
member. 
