About the Authors
NORM R. ALLEN, JR. is the executive director of African Americans for Humanism (AAH) and the co-director of the Center for Inquiry’s transnational programs. He is editor of the AAH Examiner, the international newsletter of AAH, and deputy editor of Free Inquiry magazine. Allen has edited two books: African American Humanism – An Anthology and The Black Humanist Experience: An Alternative to Religion. His writings have appeared in several books, including Voices for Evolution and Varieties of African American Religious Experience. He has lectured at such institutions as Harvard, SUNY Buffalo, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.
DONALD B. ARDELL, Ph.D., publishes the Ardell Wellness Report (AWR), a quarterly newsletter in continuous circulation since 1984, as well as the weekly electronic AWR, with 350 editions in circulation. He is director of the largest wellness website, www.SeekWellness.com. His first book in 1977, High Level Wellness: An Alternative to Doctors, Drugs and Disease is credited with starting the wellness movement. A freethinker whose work promoting healthy lifestyles focuses on critical thinking, humor, and meaning and purpose as well as all the usual suspects (fitness, responsibility, etc.), Don is also a national and world champion age group triathlete named Grandmaster of the Year in 2005 by USA Triathlon.
DAN BARKER is the author of Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist. He is married to Annie Laurie Gaylor, with whom he is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wisconsin (www.ffrf.org), an organization working to keep state and church separate and to promote freethought. Dan has five children and has written three books for children: Just Pretend: A Freethought Book for Children, Maybe Yes, Maybe No: A Guide for Young Freethinkers, and Maybe Right, Maybe Wrong: A Guide for Young Skeptics. He is also a professional jazz pianist and has composed more than 200 published songs, many for children.
AUGUST E. BRUNSMAN IV has been the Executive Director of the Secular Student Alliance since 2001. In 1997 he founded Students for Freethought at The Ohio State University. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from OSU in 2001 with a major in psychology and minors in mathematics and cognitive science. August is also the Director of Camp Quest Classic where he has volunteered since 1999. August and Amanda Metskas married in 2005 and live together in Columbus, Ohio, with their two cats, Shiva and Vishnu.
ED BUCKNER, Ph.D., has been a professor, a school administrator, and executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism. He and his wife Lois Bright have edited several books and published Oliver Halle’s Taking the Harder Right (2006). He wrote the concluding chapter of Kimberly Blaker’s Fundamentals of Extremism (2003) and coedited, with his son, Quotations that Support the Separation of State and Church (second edition, 1995). Buckner has debated and spoken across the United States, often about the Treaty of Tripoli and “This Is a Free Country, Not a Christian Nation.” He serves on several national advisory boards and committees.
MATTHEW CHERRY has spent more than fifteen years as a professional leader in the humanist movement in three different countries. In 2000 he became executive director of the Institute for Humanist Studies, which serves as a resource for and about the freethought movement. He is the author of Introduction to Humanism: A Primer on the History, Philosophy, and Goals of Humanism for www.HumanistEducation.com. In 2004, and again in 2006, he was elected president of the NGO Committee on Freedom of Religion or Belief at the United Nations in New York. He’s the first nonreligious representative to serve in this role.
SHANNON CHERRY, APR, MA, is the president of Cherry Communications and its subsidiary Be Heard Solutions. Working with small businesses, she helps entrepreneurs to find their voice, tell their story, and be heard. Shannon publishes the highly recommended e-zine, Be Heard! and is the co-author of Become Your Own Great and Powerful: A Woman’s Guide to Living Your Real Big Life. She also is the creative mind behind www.mommy-inc.com, the only blog about being an entrepreneur mom with twins. She lives in Albany, NY, with her partner, Matt, daughters Sophia and Lyra, and a menagerie of animals that keeps her smiling.
AMANDA CHESWORTH is Educational Director for the Committee for the Scientific Investigations Of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and holds a Bachelor’s in Interdisciplinary Sciences and a Master’s in Science Education. Amanda produces inquiry-based programs and materials for educators, families, and young people. Her work includes the Inquiring Minds Program, Camp Inquiry, and Imaginary Worlds, and serving as editor of Darwin Day Collection One.
MARGARET DOWNEY is the founder of the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia and editor of The Greater Philadelphia Story, a newsletter written by and for the Atheist community. Margaret has represented nontheists at several UN conferences dealing with Freedom of Religion or Belief. A past board member of the American Humanist Association, the Humanist Institute, and the Thomas Paine National Historical Association, Margaret is currently on the boards of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Godless Americans Political Action Committee, Scouting For All, and the Robert Green Ingersoll Museum. She is also a Secular Humanist Celebrant and current president of the Atheist Alliance International.
TOM FLYNN is editor of Free Inquiry, the world’s largest circulation English-language secular humanist magazine, a cofounder of the newsletter Secular Humanist Bulletin, and director of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum, the only U.S. freethought museum. An outspoken secular humanist activist, Flynn decided that Christmas was not the birthday of anyone he knew and abandoned observance of the holiday in 1984. He has been “Yule free” ever since. Flynn’s books include The Trouble with Christmas (1993), the novels Galactic Rapture (2000) and Nothing Sacred (2004), and the forthcoming New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, which he edited.
ANNE NICOL GAYLOR is a founder and president emerita of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. She served as executive director from 1978 to 2005 and is now a consultant to the Foundation. Born in rural Wisconsin, she graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She owned and managed successful small businesses and was co-owner and editor of an award-winning suburban weekly newspaper. A feminist author, she has done substantial volunteer work for women’s rights, including serving as volunteer director of the Women’s Medical Fund. Under her leadership, the Freedom From Religion Foundation has grown from three members to a national group with representation in every state and Canada.
ANNIE LAURIE GAYLOR co-founded the Freedom From Religion Foundation with her mother, Anne Nicol Gaylor, in 1976. With Dan Barker, she is co-president of the Foundation (www.ffrf.org). She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980 with a journalism degree. She edited a feminist newspaper from 1980 to 1984 and became editor of FFRF’s newspaper, Freethought Today, in 1980. Her books include Woe to the Women: The Bible Tells Me So (1981, revised 2004), Betrayal of Trust: Clergy Abuse of Children (1988, online-only now), and Women Without Superstition: No Gods—No Masters, an anthology of women freethinkers (1997). She and Dan have one daughter, Sabrina, born in 1989.
REV. DR. KENDYL GIBBONS is the senior minister of the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis. She is a graduate of the College of William and Mary and holds a Master’s degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School as well as a Doctorate of Ministry from Meadville/Lombard Theological School. She is co-dean of The Humanist Institute and is active in the interfaith clergy community of Minneapolis. She serves as an adjunct faculty member of Meadville/Lombard in Chicago and the United Theological Seminary in the Twin Cities, where she teaches in the areas of worship and liturgy and dynamics of professional leadership.
EDGAR YIPSEL “YIP” HARBURG, among the greatest and most beloved lyricists of the twentieth century, was also a nonbeliever and a secular parent. Author of such classics as “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”, “April in Paris,” and “Paper Moon,” Yip created lyrics and poems that were brilliant and unbearably clever. He often addressed serious social issues, such as war, intolerance, and injustice, with incisive and devastating wit. The seven poems appearing in this book are excerpted from Rhymes for the Irreverent, a recent collaboration between the Harburg Foundation and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and are reprinted with their kind permission.
JAMES HERRICK has worked for thirty years in the humanist movement in the UK. He is former editor of the New Humanist and International Humanist. His writings include “Vision and Realism: A hundred years of The Freethinker,” Against the Faith: Some Deists, Skeptics and Atheists, and Humanism: An Introduction. He is a co-founder of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association and has written theatre reviews regularly for various journals. Now in retirement, Jim writes, gardens, and plays the oboe.
AMY HILDEN, Ph.D., received her PhD in Philosophy, with a supporting program in Feminist Studies, from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her current scholarly interests include developing arguments in support of reclaiming the Enlightenment values of free and independent thinking, rationality, and a humanistic understanding of progress, as well as arguments for reparations for U.S. slavery and genocide. She lives with her husband and two teenage children in Minneapolis and teaches in the Philosophy Department at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul. Her children have had numerous long car trips, with some obligatory “unplugged” time.
Better known as “Agnostic Mom” online, NOELL HYMAN contributes monthly columns to the Humanist Network News, the weekly e-zine for the Institute for Humanist Studies, and is an expert writer for the website ClubMom. An energetic mother of three young children, Noell and husband Israel are currently involved with numerous podcasting and blogging ventures. Relatively new to the secular landscape, Noell declared herself a humanist in 2002 after leaving the Mormon Church. Noell’s aim is to reach other nonreligious parents who find themselves isolated in the struggle to raise a healthy family without religion.
PENN JILLETTE is the Emmy Award–winning illusionist/entertainer/debunker of the duo Penn & Teller. Author of several books, star and producer of such films as The Aristocrats and Penn & Teller Get Killed, he and his partner have also served as visiting lecturers at MIT and Oxford. Jillette’s current efforts are split between a live national talk show, the Showtime series Bullshit! (which debunks such frauds as alien abduction, magnetic cures, and talking to the dead), and a daily live show in Las Vegas. Penn is married to producer Emily Zolten Jillette, with whom he has two young children, Moxie (born in 2005) and Zolten (born in 2006).
ROBERT E. KAY, MD, is a retired psychiatrist who graduated from Tufts University Medical School and did his residency at Walter Reed General Hospital. After serving in the Army, he settled in Philadelphia where he has treated both adults and children in many different inpatient and outpatient settings. Publications include articles on raising children, teaching reading, the problem of school, ADHD versus the TV set, and the difficulties inherent in a becoming a good psychiatrist without objective verifiable data in terms of etiology, diagnosis, treatment, or results.
BOBBIE KIRKHART is a former Sunday school teacher whose first national publication was in Christianity Today. She is currently vice president of the Secular Coalition for America and has served as co-president of Atheists United and as president of the Atheist Alliance International. In addition to her regular President’s Messages in The Rational Alternative and Secular Nation, her work has been printed in Free Inquiry and American Atheist magazines. She is a contributing author of The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America, published by New Boston Books.
DAVID KOEPSELL, JD, Ph.D., is a philosopher and lawyer specializing in research ethics, meta-ethics, and society and politics. As executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, he lectures and speaks to the media on issues of secularism, freedom of conscience, and civil rights. Koepsell holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and JD from State University of New York at Buffalo, where he has taught law, critical thinking, writing, research ethics, and ontology. He is a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at SUNY Buffalo and the author of numerous articles and reviews.
KRISTAN LAWSON is a writer and entrepreneur. Founder and publisher of Jolly Roger Press in the 1990s, Kristan is also a renowned travel expert, authoring several major travel guides for California and Europe, including California Babylon (St. Martin’s Press), Weird Europe (St. Martin’s Press), America Off The Wall: The West Coast (Wiley, 1989), and Europe Off The Wall (Wiley, 1988). He is a 1981 graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.
GARETH B. MATTHEWS, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy (emeritus) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He taught previously at the University of Virginia and the University of Minnesota. He is the author of many articles and three books on ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophy: Thought’s Ego in Augustine and Descartes (Cornell, 1992), Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy (Oxford, 1999), and Augustine (Blackwell, 2005). He is also the author many articles and three books on philosophy and childhood: Philosophy and the Young Child (Harvard, 1980), Dialogues with Children ( Harvard, 1984), and The Philosophy of Childhood (Harvard, 1994). These books have been translated into a dozen languages. Gary has three children and six grandchildren.
DALE McGOWAN, Ph.D., is a writer, editor, and critical thinking educator in Minneapolis. His satirical novel Calling Bernadette’s Bluff has been called “an undoubted triumph of satire” and “wicked funny.” He recently completed Northing at Midlife, a humorous narrative of a midlife crisis encountered on the trails of Britain. McGowan is editor of Rumors of Peace, the international newsletter of Nonviolent Peaceforce, is on the board of the Critical Thinking Club, Inc., and has taught critical thinking skills in the college classroom, the corporate boardroom, and public venues. He is a father of three and husband of one.
JEAN MERCER, Ph.D., is a developmental psychologist with a Ph.D. from Brandeis University and is Professor Emerita at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey. She has been a board member and officer of the New Jersey Association for Infant Mental Health for many years and is on the faculty of Youth Consultation Service in East Orange, NJ. The author of a number of books and articles about early development, she has for the last five years been seriously engaged in the fight against “Attachment Therapy,” a cultlike belief system that encourages intrusive and harmful physical practices in the guise of child psychotherapy.
AMANDA K. METSKAS received her M.A. in political science from The Ohio State University in 2005. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Brown University in 2002 with Honors in International Relations. Amanda is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the department of political science at Ohio State. She has been involved with Camp Quest Classic (Ohio) since 2003 and is currently serving as the President of the Camp Quest Classic Board of Directors. Amanda and August Brunsman married in 2005 and live together in Columbus, Ohio, with their two cats, Shiva and Vishnu.
THE REV. DR. ROBERTA M. NELSON is Emeritus Minister of Religious Education at the Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda, Maryland. She has also served congregations in Needham, Massachusetts, and in Oakton, Virginia. She has served as president of the Liberal Religious Educators Association and as vice-president of the UU Ministers Association. She is a member of the Meadville/Lombard Theological School Board of Trustees. She has also served as a board member of the Religious Education Association. She is coauthor of the curricula Parents as Resident Theologians, Parents as Social Justice Educators, and Parents as Spiritual Guides.
EMILY ROSA grew up in Colorado. In 1998, the appearance of her study on Therapeutic Touch in the Journal of the American Medical Association created a media sensation and put her in the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest person to publish serious medical research, conducted two years earlier at age 9. She later experimented with “healing magnets” and in the eighth grade won first place in her division at the Colorado State Science Fair for measuring the circumference of the world with homemade instruments and unique units of measurement. She just finished two years of university at CU-Boulder. Her academic interest is in forensic psychology.
Grammy Award–winning comedian JULIA SWEENEY is also an actor, playwright, and monologist. Perhaps best known for her androgynous character Pat on Saturday Night Live and her critically acclaimed one-woman monologue God Said, Ha!, Sweeney has also appeared in films, including Pulp Fiction and Stuart Little. Her monologue Letting Go of God, which chronicles her journey from faith to philosophical naturalism, was Critics’ Choice for the Los Angeles Times and Pick of the Week for the LA Weekly. She is the author of My Beautiful Loss of Faith Story and was the 2006 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award for raising public awareness of the nontheistic life stance. She is the adoptive mother of a 7-year-old girl named Mulan.
STU TANQUIST is a national speaker, seminar leader, and published author with over twenty years of experience in the learning and development industry. He facilitates learning on variety of topics including critical thinking. His employment ranges from working as an emergency paramedic to serving as a strategic-level director for training and development for a large urban medical center. Stu holds three degrees including an MS in Management. In his free time, he coordinates the South Metro Chapter of the Critical Thinking Club of Minnesota.
Bronx-born Coloradoan PETE WERNICK earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University while developing a career in music on the side. His bestselling instruction book Bluegrass Banjo allowed “Dr. Banjo” to leave his sociology research job at Cornell to form Hot Rize, a classic bluegrass band that traveled worldwide. Pete served as president of the International Bluegrass Music Association for fifteen years. Pete, his wife, and son survived the disastrous Sioux City plane crash in 1989. A Life Magazine article following the crash identified Pete as a humanist and noted that he didn’t see a supernatural factor in his survival. An atheist since age 15, Pete was president of the Family of Humanists from 1997 to 2006. Today he continues to perform, run music camps nationwide, and produce instructional videos for banjo and bluegrass.
A lifelong agnostic, JANE WYNNE WILLSON became involved in the Humanist movement in the UK when her oldest child met religion head-on at a state primary school. Since then she has been active at local, national, and international levels, serving as president of the London-based International Humanist and Ethical Union and Vice-President of the British Humanist Association, and author of Parenting Without God, New Arrivals, Sharing the Future, and Funerals Without God. A retired special needs teacher with four children and ten grandchildren, Jane has a deep interest in bringing up children happily with a strong basis for morality but no religion.