As a teenager he was the editor of his high school paper and wrote for science fiction fanzines. In 1964 he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, where he wrote for the Daily Illini. In 1966, while pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Chicago, Ebert was hired as a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times and became its film critic a year later. He would live in Chicago and write for the Sun-Times for the rest of his life.

Ebert was known to produce somewhere between 200 and 300 film reviews a year, which were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, both in the United States and abroad. He was the first film critic to receive the Pulitzer Prize (1975) and went on to achieve small-screen fame as the co-host, along with film critic Gene Siskel, of the wildly popular At the Movies TV show featuring their signature “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” rating system.

In 2002 Ebert was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer, the treatment of which required multiple surgeries and resulted in him losing the ability to talk, eat, or drink. Ebert continued to review films, but as he embraced social media and became a prolific blogger, his persona as caustic critic expanded to that of fierce progressive and thoughtful champion for social justice.

Ebert was also a strong proponent of churchstate separation, as voiced in an August 18, 2012, column titled, “Don’t Tear Down that Wall!” in which he criticized efforts to teach creationism in public schools and legislative action to control individuals’ reproductive choices.

Commenting on the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals 2003 finding that it was unconstitutional to require public school students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance because of the words “under God,” Ebert made the distinction between two kinds of prayer, vertical and horizontal, the latter of which he strongly decried. (Incidentally, the column, “Public Prayer Fanatics Borrow Page from Enemy’s Script,” was reprinted in the May/June 2003 Humanist.) “To choose an example from football,” Ebert wrote, “when my team needs a field goal to win and I think, ‘Please, dear God, let them make it!’—that is vertical prayer. When, before the game, a group of fans joins hands and ‘voluntarily’ recites the Lord’s Prayer—that is horizontal prayer. It serves one of two purposes: to encourage me to join them, or to make me feel excluded.”

In another Chicago-Sun column, written in 2009 and titled, “New Agers and Creationists Should Not Be President,” Ebert humorously lamented that many progressives, while wisely shunning creationism, were perfectly comfortable espousing all manner of supernatural or pseudoscientific ideas. “They were raised to avoid religion and politics at dinner parties with strangers. Yet they assure everyone they are ‘a typical Gemini,’ were royalty in a previous lifetime, have a personal spirit guide, and have been told they will develop a serious disease but will recover from it. I rarely hear anyone share that they were a toilet cleaner in a previous lifetime and have a year to live at the most.”

Roger Ebert died on April 4, 2013, after a long battle with cancer. In a 2009 blog entry titled, “Go Gently into That Good Night,” Ebert wrote of death: “I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. … I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do.”

Long estranged from his wife, Owen’s divorce does liberate a part of him. Yet he must also find a way to free himself from the many negative assumptions and beliefs engendered by a lonely, emotionally deprived childhood—as well as an assortment of personal tragedies. Highlighted among these misfortunes are his three-year-old self searching the household frantically for his mother, only to discover her hanging from a bathroom curtain rod, and the heart-wrenching death of his beloved six-month-old daughter, a devastating tragedy from which he’s never really recovered.

Owen is a hospital psychologist and psychoanalyst—as is the novel’s renowned author, Jon Mills (PhD, PsyD, ABPP), who has written or edited over 100 publications, including thirteen books. Though not nearly as prolific as his creator, Owen (who’s in analysis himself) is working on a second book on trauma (obviously to better comprehend his own trauma-shaped identity). And his core defense against the many hardships he’s endured has been to detach himself from his feelings—which, ironically, mirror the self-defeating ego-protectiveness of some of his patients, whose torturous, self-flagellating sessions he poignantly narrates.

His own emotions, he candidly admits, are “in exile under the guise of control.” And so the anguish and despair characterizing so much of the novel’s disheartened tone is juxtaposed with Owen’s shameful and self-humiliating confession that he’s lost all genuine caring for others, as well as for himself. In fact, the central themes in the novel are clearly rooted in basic existential tenets and starkly reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre’s atheistic/humanistic regard for humankind’s eternal predicaments. (In his acknowledgments, Mills recognizes his intellectual debt not only to Sartre but to many other acclaimed thinkers in Western philosophy and literature—including Georges Bataille, Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Martin Heidegger, William James, Carl Jung, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, Jacques Lacan, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Donald Winnicott.)

Mills’ fiction revolves around how the narrator, through his various desperate attempts to recapture both his empathy and authenticity, finally retrieves the sense of vitality, meaning, and purpose he’d lost, having been utterly adrift in a formless, aimless existence of his own unconscious making.

But until the work’s conclusion—suffused in paradox, yet curiously life-affirming—the book focuses on the narrator’s obsessive ruminations on the meaninglessness of his existence and his all-consuming apathy. In the opening chapter, he reflects on “the dismal familiarity of my chronic discontent” and how “all traces of concern for others had been purged,” going on to confess: “It is in me … this filth, infecting my consciousness with a caustic bile. All commitment toward others had been regurgitated, my obligations effaced.” It’s transparent that feeling dead inside, he’s incapable of summoning up any real fellow feeling. Aware that to be truly concerned about those he meets—and professionally treats—he must be able to personalize them, he comes to realize that in his systematic retreat from his own pain he’s ended up objectifying almost all of humanity.

Although his father, an eminent classics professor, is a devout Catholic, religious belief offers Owen no solace. And his position on religion generally borders on the hostile. Skeptical empiricist that he is, he sees people of faith as “worship[ing] a wish.” Sent to parochial schools and brought up on Catholic doctrine, he observes that he still occasionally talks to God, but sardonically adds, “God never listens.” Brooding over his infant daughter’s death, he muses, “If God really did make all this, I wonder if he ever wept?”

As an alternative to the glib reassurances of meaning offered by the church, Owen declares that science is his religion. And he eventually advances his own existential/humanistic stance toward what can be affirmed in the face of human suffering and a seemingly indifferent universe. “Only one thing is for certain,” he proposes, “you have this life and it’s up to you to decide how to live it, how to fulfill it, how to be. We make choices and no matter how trite or careless they may seem to be, they are still our choices—in this moment, in this time. I believe that the most fulfilling life is one that is lived as authentically as possible.” Elsewhere he states: “The mark of a successful life is being able to look at yourself squarely in the face and honestly ask whether you have made an impact on other peoples’ lives.”

And finally, consider the narrator’s self-transformative message elucidated toward the end of the novel: “Life is an either-or, either this option or the next—you cannot have it both ways,” Owen realizes, stating further on that, “while some things in life may be understood, I concluded that the riddle of Being can never be fully known, only appreciated as a process of becoming. … As a purpose without a purpose—without a cause, life is bound to paradox.”

I’ve quoted so liberally to give the reader a broader sense of the gravitas of this unusual fictional undertaking. It’s a deeply psychological and philosophical novel, as penetrating as it is thought-provoking. But I must add that although the work—encompassing a critical, event-crammed day in the narrator’s life—is inundated with such abstract, contemplative introspection, it also includes a concrete, absorbing plot; a selective but intriguing mix of compellingly portrayed characters; and the narrator’s intense love for an unhappily married female colleague (who has long been his personal and professional confidante). Beyond these more “novelistic” elements, there’s an engaging, dramatic progression that builds throughout the novel right up to its stunning—and totally unexpected—conclusion.

While it would be unconscionable to disclose the utterly unpredictable ending to When God Wept, let me at least suggest that it simultaneously undermines and affirms everything that’s happened and been meditated upon earlier. Which is to say that the extraordinary and absurd climax, steeped in irony and paradox, validates the novel’s entire dramatic, thematic, and ideational structure. It is a finish that brilliantly resolves everything … and nothing.

Leon F. Seltzer, a humanist therapist who holds PhDs in both English and psychology, currently practices psychology in Del Mar, California. The author of two books, he also writes a popular blog for Psychology Today called “Evolution of the Self.” A version of this review was previously published there.

The Humanist: First, congratulations on publishing your book and getting married in the same month. Talk about positive stress.

Greg Lukianoff: Thank you. Yes, it’s been pretty intense. But in a good way—both have been tremendously satisfying.

The Humanist: Tell us about your book, Unlearning Liberty. What’s the main premise?

Lukianoff: Well, for several decades, U.S. colleges have increasingly turned to censorship of both students and faculty. As a result, students are learning to withhold their opinions from each other, and are talking primarily to those with whom they already agree. They aren’t learning nearly enough about critical thinking, how to tolerate emotional discomfort during debate, or what free expression really means.

The Humanist: You’ve done a great job in detailing the specific tools that colleges now use to censor—in fact, they’re so common that they aren’t even discussed very much.

Lukianoff: Yes, their tools include speech codes, bans on anonymous fliers, limits on what can be said in classrooms, the elimination of due process, limiting campus protest to tiny “free speech” zones, the assertion of power over students’ off-campus speech, and more.

The Humanist: Let’s start with a real-life example from the book.

Lukianoff: One of the most ridiculous examples of college censorship occurred in 2007 at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. A student who was working his way through college as a janitor—a student in his fifties—was reading the book Notre Dame versus the Klan by Todd Tucker. It’s about the defeat of the Ku Klux Klan when they tried to march on the University of Notre Dame in the 1920s. The cover had a picture of the Klan rally that attempted that march, a famous historical photo. And he was found guilty of racial harassment because the book cover made another employee uncomfortable.

The student employee wasn’t allowed a chance to respond, he wasn’t allowed any chance to defend himself or explain that it isn’t a racist book. All that mattered was someone had taken offense, and there was nothing he could do to fight back. It was a book that the university actually had in their library, so they had already judged it acceptable.

It took the combined efforts of FIRE, the ACLU, and the Wall Street Journal to get the university to entirely back down.

The Humanist: He had been put on probation?

Lukianoff: Essentially, yes. But worse is the charge of racial harassment. If you go out looking for a job in the real world with that on your record, people could assume that you’re actually a member of the Klan rather than assume you were falsely accused of racism because you read a book about the defeat of the Klan.

The Humanist: You see such censorship as part of a historical context, right? I guess it’s connected with wanting to prevent people from behaving in ways that make other people feel uncomfortable.

Lukianoff: Like a lot of censorship movements, the modern campus speech code movement was motivated, at least in part, by people who thought they were doing something kind or wise. And while we don’t have any illusions about some past golden age of free speech on campus, things were definitely better during the 1960s and ’70s. But starting in the 1980s there was a significant about-face with the genesis of speech code theory, which posited that if you really wanted a tolerant society, you had to clamp down on speech that could be hurtful or offensive on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, and the like. So universities started passing speech codes in the late ’80s, even though they were defeated roundly in the court of public opinion—both on the right and on the left—and there were many court challenges. Sadly, there are more speech codes in place now than there ever were in the 1980s and ’90s.

They’re based on the idea that censorship can promote a moral good. I find it so interesting that speech codes continue to be defended using this rubric of tolerance and care. But when you look at the cases I cover in Unlearning Liberty, you see that speech codes and censorship are no longer used the way they were initially intended. (Even if they were, they would still be unconstitutional.) But time and again, the arguments of tolerance and kindness get used to silence legitimate speech: punishing a student for writing an article that’s critical of Islamic terrorism, for example, or telling a professor that he can’t put a poster quoting the sci-fi western Firefly [that makes a reference to killing] outside his office door.

The temptation to misuse institutional power and the common desire of one group to silence other groups if they can are two important reasons why we need a separate amendment to protect freedom of speech. And that’s why you have to place censorship off the table. I watch college administrators toggle through rationales. They start with a response: “I’m offended by that expression,” “I don’t like that expression,” or “I don’t like you.” And then they proceed to their arsenal of tools: “Should I go with harassment in this case? A safety or student instability argument? Or should I go with some kind of time, place, and manner argument?” When censorship or punishment is disingenuously allowed in the name of tolerance, it gives speech codes a better reputation than they deserve.

The Humanist: Please talk about how the original doctrines of sexual harassment or racial harassment policies were never designed to prevent people from feeling uncomfortable. As far as I understand, they were designed to prevent or undo environments in which people could not pursue their own rights, such as to learn or work.

Lukianoff: FIRE is extremely clear about this: we don’t believe that people should be racially or sexually harassed. But we’re always explaining that harassment is a serious pattern of behavior targeting someone for a characteristic like race or gender—sort of an extension of traditional anti-discrimination law. These newer doctrines addressed the reality that employers could get around anti-discrimination law by hiring women or people of color, but then making the workplace so miserable for them that they couldn’t continue working in it.

Unfortunately, the next step is rather predictable: eventually, this well-intentioned, narrowly defined idea ends up getting applied in ways that were never even vaguely intended. At Brandeis University, for example, a professor who’d been teaching Latin American studies for close to fifty years explained to his class where the epithet “wetback” came from, and he was found guilty of racial harassment.

The Humanist: What should he have said, “the ‘W’ word”?

Lukianoff: Some people apparently think so. Among the people who should be angriest about this are the very people who most believe harassment should be stopped, because when you dilute it like this and it leads to so many trivial examples, it causes people not to take the concept of harassment very seriously.

The Humanist: Not unlike if everything is called molestation, it trivializes real molestation.

Lukianoff: What unites sexual misconduct codes and sexual harassment codes and speech codes is that if you define things broadly enough, every single student on your campus is guilty of either a speech code violation or of sexual misconduct—which makes it very easy for administrators to then pick and choose who they want to target. This, of course, works out poorly for people who are different or unpopular, people who are oddballs, or in some cases students that the administrators simply don’t like.

The Humanist: One of the things you lament in your book is that differences of opinion are no longer viewed as opportunities to learn or as chances to think through ideas. Please say more about that.

Lukianoff: Speech codes and changed attitudes about freedom of speech have created all of these negative feedback loops for expression and critical thinking. As you censor unpopular opinions you end up with classroom environments where individuals can’t really speak their minds. You also end up with students mostly talking to people they already agree with. The research on this is very strong—when you talk to people you already agree with, it thwarts development of critical thinking skills, and it makes people much more confident in what they already believe. It tends to make people more adamant, and exacerbates the serious problem of groupthink.

If we’ve legislated politeness, and legitimized the idea that disagreeing with somebody could potentially hurt his or her feelings, why bother to discuss anything? We have to teach people that debate and discussion lead to better ideas—they allow us to be more creative and to develop critical thinking skills. Moreover, the idea that meaningful, meaty debates over the most serious issues can actually be fun has been badly damaged.

The Humanist: In the sixties such discussions were considered foreplay.

Lukianoff: Putting this weird energy around disagreement, dissent, satire, parody, devil’s advocacies, or thought experimentation makes everything so dreadfully serious. Students no longer appreciate the idea that the professor whose seemingly strange attitudes about everything from sex to religion to politics could actually be presenting an opportunity to dive into something interesting—as opposed to saying something another person’s fragile ego can’t handle.

The Humanist: I love this line from your book: “Political correctness has become part of the nervous system of the modern university.” You make a crucial connection between the intellectual habits that people are absorbing on campus and the degraded way democracy is now functioning.

Lukianoff: Again, universities need to return to the idea that it’s good for you to talk to the smart person you disagree with, it’s fun, and it’s a truly great habit that will make you more creative and thoughtful. If universities taught that, they could actually be pushing back against all of this mindless bipolarity and groupthink that’s damaging the country today. Instead, we’re super-charging people’s opinions by discouraging them from talking to people with whom they disagree.

The Humanist: One thing you’ve brought to my attention is the increasing campus policy of banning unsigned fliers.

Lukianoff: We see universities in a lot of cases trying to ban anonymous expression, going so far as requiring fliers to have names and other information about the students who write them. The College of William & Mary in Virginia is the country’s second oldest college, where some of our founders went. These very same founders went on to produce anonymous writings like the Federalist Papers, which had tremendous impact on our entire society and the world. So when you have campus administrators not believing there could possibly be value in anonymous speech, you have to wonder if they know the history of what Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, or James Madison wrote uncredited.

The Humanist: How do you respond to universities’ claim that banning anonymous fliers makes people more responsible and less likely to just trash each other?

Lukianoff: Actually, I think there’s some truth in that. If people have to suffer the natural consequences of their speech, they’re typically less cavalier about what they say. At the same time, you can’t ban anonymous speech until people feel very confident that they can hold any point of view they want. As long as you can still get in real trouble on campus for having the wrong point of view, anonymous speech makes perfect sense—just as it did way back when saying what one believed could put your life or property in danger.

On campuses right now, students don’t and shouldn’t feel completely confident that they can express whatever opinion they want. And until every single speech code is gone, banning anonymous speech is a powerful form of censorship.

The Humanist: In fact it goes beyond that. You can now get into trouble for what you say off campus.

Lukianoff: Absolutely. Schools now have the power to punish students for what they write on Facebook or what they say at a political event or even a party off campus.

The Humanist: So how did FIRE become so powerful so quickly? I mean, at thirteen years old, it’s a relative upstart compared with, say, the ACLU.

Lukianoff: I think FIRE became influential so quickly due to a combination of things. Most importantly, there were so many abuses of power on so many campuses, and we were willing to challenge them regardless of ideology. When evangelical Christians get in trouble, FIRE is there. If Richard Dawkins is being investigated for speaking at the University of Oklahoma, FIRE is there. It was really a niche that needed to be filled.

[FIRE founders] Alan Kors’ and Harvey Silverglate’s idea that FIRE’s primary weapon would be public exposure rather than litigation was also very smart. Because, as Kors has said, universities cannot defend in public what they do in private. Our wonderful employees put in an awful lot of hard work, often on short deadlines. We pull in journalists and others from the local community, and alert the national media when there’s been an outrageous violation of rights. We’re very passionate about getting the word out.

The Humanist: What do you mean when you say that universities can’t defend in public what they do in private?

Lukianoff: So many university administrators get used to thinking of their school as their own personal fiefdom. One of the best examples involves the great First Amendment attorney Bob Corn-Revere. He’s currently litigating a FIRE case that started back in 2007 when a student at Valdosta State University in Georgia was expelled as a result of protesting the school’s decision to put up a parking garage. This student, Hayden Barnes, thought there were less expensive and more environmentally friendly ways to deal with campus transportation problems. However, VSU President Ronald Zaccari had been defeated by environmentalists in his goal to build the parking garage many years before, and he wasn’t going to let that happen again.

Barnes wrote a letter to the school’s newspaper, called members of the Board of Trustees to respectfully explain why they shouldn’t vote for the parking garage, and he posted a collage on Facebook satirizing what he dubbed the “Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage.” The collage featured images of smog, an asthma inhaler, and a “no blood for oil” logo. The “memorial” part of the title was a jab at Zaccari’s claim that the parking garage would be a proud part of his legacy.

So Zaccari kicked Barnes out, claiming that the collage—because it used the word “memorial”—was a threat on his  life, as memorials usually appear after a person’s death. Various administrators tried to explain that he couldn’t expel the student without due process, also suggesting that Barnes wasn’t a threat to anybody. They even went into his medical records, and the campus counseling center verified that he wasn’t a threat. (Incidentally, he’s a nonviolent Shambhala Buddhist and a decorated emergency medical technician.)

Court documents suggest the Facebook collage was discovered after Zaccari had decided to expel the kid. Regardless, nobody believed Barnes’ speech posed an actual threat, and the law is clear that you can say things much more offensive than “memorial parking garage” on college campuses, and that you have to provide expelled students due process.

[Update: On February 1, 2013, at the Huffington Post, Lukianoff reported: “Earlier today, a federal jury in Georgia found former Valdosta State University (VSU) President Ronald Zaccari personally liable to the tune of $50,000 for violating the due process rights of former student Hayden Barnes.]

The Humanist: FIRE periodically defends students’ religious beliefs that some humanists—or non-humanists—would find hateful. Why?

Lukianoff: Personally, I’ve been an atheist since seventh grade. And FIRE was founded by two non-religious civil libertarians. All of us believe in the entire First Amendment, and that includes the establishment clause and free exercise clause.

So we’ve defended Muslim student groups and evangelical Christian student groups, some of whom are being kicked off campus because they believe that homosexuality is sinful. I don’t agree with that point of view, and I both hope and believe that such views will eventually be abandoned. But I challenge my friends who support expelling such groups: Do we really want to live in a society that can try to coerce somebody into changing their theological point of view just because it’s unpopular?

Our founders learned from Europe’s religious wars that the government should stay out of establishing a theocracy, deciding matters of theology, or interfering with people’s faith.

I understand the frustration on campus—some people want evangelicals to change their minds on issues like sexual morality. But you’re not doing that cause any favors if your solution is to kick those students off the campus. It probably hardens their point of view, and turns the narrative from “We have an idea that many people find objectionable” into “We’re being exiled for our points of view.” So, in addition to the strategy being wrong, I think it can backfire.

The Humanist: Intolerance—say of another’s code of sexual morality—is assumed to be a bad thing on campus because supposedly it creates an environment that makes other people uncomfortable.

Lukianoff: Yes. The question of making people uncomfortable versus discriminating against them is a distinction that I draw all the time. There’s a big difference between discriminating on the basis of an immutable characteristic, and opposing on the basis of a belief. Discriminating on the basis of an immutable characteristic like skin color or sexual orientation is something that should be challenged, as this discrimination prevents others from exercising their rights. But belief is intertwined with expression and civic integrity. Democratic societies need to nurture and protect people’s right to believe anything they want, no matter how distasteful it may be to others, even if those others are in the majority.

The Humanist: Thank you for your work with FIRE, and for writing an important book. I know there’s a Zen saying you use to summarize the importance of nourishing disagreement and critical thinking on campus.

Lukianoff: Yes, it goes like this: “Great doubt, great awakening. Little doubt, little awakening. No doubt, no awakening.”

Marty Klein, PhD, is the author of seven books, including America’s War On Sex (Praeger) and the recent Sexual Intelligence (HarperCollins). His last article for the Humanist was “You’re Addicted to What? Challenging the Myth of Sex Addiction” (July/August 2012). He blogs at www.sexed.org.

The vast machine we call Hollywood shouldn’t be set up as a conservative straw man: the spectacles it offers us tend to be on the progressive side of the political spectrum. Racism, sexism, and classism are deplored; the underdog outsmarts the top dog; those unwilling to think outside the box are proven gloriously wrong; elderly teachers are outdone or tricked by young, hip students with the sense of humor and experimentation their desiccated educators lack. There’s also a different type of teacher, the good kind: not past his prime, not socially conservative, eager to share ideas, liable to drink or smoke various substances, not abstinent from the sensual pleasures of life. Indeed, sometimes he partakes rather freely, sharing more than ideas with his attractive students. But he’s always a he.

Maybe I should be careful what I wish for. The anti-intellectualism and sexual fixation Deresiewicz accurately brings to light would only swing against female professors if we suddenly found ourselves hot in Hollywood. And to be ambivalently represented is, after all, what so many women tired of the saint-or-sinner binary do ask for. Let’s also not forget that bad guys are rarely just that. They often provoke fantasy more than their virtuous counterparts, and our amusement at lecherous professors belies an attraction to them that is not well repressed. Granted, the stereotypical professor has grey, disheveled hair or no hair at all, and often shows a propensity for clearance-rack getups or bowties (The Paper Chase). Knowing that knowledge equals power, we are attracted to him either because of the power he represents and the desire he apparently has for us—especially if we’re younger than he (Elegy and many others)—or the thrill of transgression (it could get him fired). He possesses both the ability to educate, to make us smart like him, and to exercise a resolutely unintellectual magnetism (see the young mathematics professor of the former CBS drama Numb3rs). Because his attractions are considered unconventional, our desire is enlivened by the mild thrill of nonconformity.

The real shock, of course, would be if he were a she. Granted, there have been female professors shown on television and in film. The unconventional HBO series Six Feet Under elicited chuckles at the expense of self-absorbed, politically over-correct female faculty—who were not, I should add, particularly desirable. Yet the overwhelming tendency is to portray academics as male. Recent statistics, meanwhile, have confirmed that more women are receiving university degrees than men. A gender imbalance still exists in the upper reaches of academia, but it may disappear sooner than we think. If the women receiving degrees enter graduate school en masse and successfully navigate the perilous seas of the job market, there could be a huge influx of women into the faculty pool. This is purely hypothetical, but just imagine: what if most professors were female? Hollywood’s portrayals of the hallowed halls would soon appear quaint.

There are many well-documented reasons why women aren’t as likely to attain permanent faculty positions as men, and they’re often the same reasons used to explain the infamous pay gap between male and female workers. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of subtle evidence that male and female academics are perceived differently by their students. Women are more apt to be addressed by their first names (sometimes even nicknames), to receive comments regarding their appearances (or at least top-to-bottom body scans, often while lecturing), to be contradicted, and to have their qualifications doubted. Most female academics would, I suspect, be happy to oblige with illustrative anecdotes. I remember my own speechlessness when a male student asked me after class if I was “a real professor,” because, according to him, I just didn’t look like one. I felt myself go cold inside my wool blazer. It was okay, he explained: he’d heard that there were lots of teaching assistants leading classes at our university. My extensive academic training hadn’t equipped me to answer him. Short of handing him my CV, I wasn’t sure what would be convincing. Perhaps a witty repartee was in order. But life rarely mirrors a Hollywood script.

His doubt may have deeper reasons: consider how we insist on gendering the mind. Rationality is stubbornly allied with masculinity, even though abstract qualities—reason, justice, hope—are traditionally personified as feminine figures. When we apply these qualities to human personalities, though, we associate reason with men. Women’s virtues typically center on social morality—temperance, patience, mercy, and so forth—not intellect. The stereotype is that women make good teachers because of their gentle natures, their compassion and, of course, their feminine intuition. The antisocial qualities associated with genius are rarely seen as feminine. Again, this is a double-edged situation: while it may be flattering to be considered socially apt, compassionate, and intuitive, there are plenty of female scholars who realize how closely the excellence of their work depends upon sequestration, selfish allocation of time, and the use of “cold” rationality.

We don’t have to replace our ambiguously positive image of woman as social being—the hostess with the mostess—for one of woman as hermit, crouched in her lair, scratching out esoteric insights by the light of a tallow candle. Nor must we lament that contemporary women have traded conventional human relationships for happy marriages to their laptops. A spate of articles has recently appeared on the rise of single-family households, the changing face of long-term relationships, and the consequences of women’s mass entrance into the workplace. The most convincing present an impressive array of statistics, and the least convincing either lament that the nuclear family may stop being our basic household unit or celebrate the author’s own lifestyle. Such reading can be great fun. The danger that these “state-of-society” articles pose, though, is a strengthening of our self-righteousness, as readers will feel compelled to defend their own choices. Self-satisfaction can narrow the mind and blind us to other phenomena. For instance, despite the fact that large numbers of adult women are currently living alone, lots of people are still uncomfortable with the idea that these women are content—or that this is a choice, not a tragic fate. What if such women are professionally and emotionally fulfilled, resembling neither the old woman who lived in a shoe nor her recent doppelganger, the crazy cat lady? Why do we dislike the sight of a woman dining alone, treating herself to a meal outside her own kitchen?

These questions may seem far from the original topic, but I believe they’re part of the same social quandary—namely that we’re still made uncomfortable by the idea that women’s independence might be, well, real independence. Beyond hoping that the woman sitting alone might be joined by a nice man, we don’t quite know how to cope with the idea that women might out-earn men in many households. We worry about a possible crisis in masculinity and are loathe to admit that the qualities of mind necessary to doing good intellectual work—logic, rationality, organization, perseverance, ambition—might be equally distributed between the sexes.

When will we stop gendering abstractions? The question is neither utopian nor idle. When my first academic article was accepted by a scholarly journal, I was a grateful graduate student in her mid-twenties who was thrilled to be praised. “This article is admirably structured and written,” the report claimed. “The author writes in a strong, masculine style.” My virtues were clarity, strength, and masculinity. I believe the word “virile” was used. Scholarly articles are supposed to be evaluated anonymously, so how would they know.

I felt irrational self-doubt: should I aspire to virility? I had never thought of my writing as masculine. But then, I hadn’t thought of it as feminine either, unless you connect femininity with my weakness for long, byzantine sentences. I had been roundly reproached for them in school, whereupon Operation Short Sentence was launched (and later abandoned). But then, what did stylistic particularities have to do with gender? Is there anything inherently feminine about, say, an exclamation mark, and anything masculine about a period? What about a colon, the mark of equivalence? Is it gender-neutral? What about question marks (so ostentatiously on display here)? Psychological linguists have suggested that self-interrogation is practiced more by girls and women than by boys and men. More women than men place an “interrogative lift” at the ends of spoken sentences, making statements sound like questions. And what about writers who consider themselves transgendered—where do they fit in?

Language, whether we see it as an innate or a learned capacity, operates by rules that are learned by all of its users. We cannot make and break them at will to imbue our language with femininity or masculinity. We do, however, have a glorious amount of leeway within the containing structures of language, and people can craft a style to accord with a certain personality type. If they couldn’t, then literary critics would have little to do. But are stylistic personalities gendered? If we were to remove all references to sexual psychology and lifestyle from a piece of writing—say, an article about inflation—then it would be tricky to determine the sex of its author. And yet, we keep trying to make such determinations. If the author lamented the high price of steak, we might assume he were male; if the author wrote about diapers, we might assume she were female. Yet men change diapers. And women like steak. What gives? Wordy or emotional writing is often seen as feminine; terse, laconic sentences are considered masculine. But what if content and style appear mismatched?

It all sounds a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it. Trying to ascertain the sex of an anonymous writer puts us face to face with the arbitrariness of our assumptions about sex and gender. There’s also no reason why it should matter in many cases; good writing is good writing. Or, going back to my original point about female academics and film, good characterization is good characterization. We might assume that it’s easier to identify with a person of our own sex, but this is often untrue for readers and for spectators. When I watch a spy movie or a crime drama, my sympathies are with the puzzle-solvers, never the beauties who help or seduce them away from their work. Hollywood has done well to fracture these stereotypes of male problem-solver and female seductress—which is merely a pop-cultural version of the classic division of mind and body—but they are merely fractured, not totally broken. Perhaps having more female directors would make a difference.

A far deeper issue, though, is what’s sometimes called “gender-othering”—seeing the other gender as an extreme instance of otherness. In other words, the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” idea that popularizes and often perverts serious science in order to make a splash. It would be ignorant to deny that real differences exist between men’s and women’s bodies and minds (not to mention those who don’t identify with the sex assigned to them by their inborn characteristics). It would be equally ignorant to deny that such differences have a deep impact on the way people live their lives. But it would be enormously damaging to insist that such differences must be present at every level of human endeavor: the way we love, the way we work, the way we write, the way we spend money, the way we entertain ourselves.

The greatest danger, I believe, lies in gendering the way we think. How many girls have been brought up with the notion that math and science are male abilities, that girls just aren’t as good at them, and that it’s unfeminine to be good at them? There are task forces that dedicate time to studying exactly why women go into certain professions and not others. Many parents wonder whether single-sex schools would help or hinder their children. I also wonder how many male students feel reluctant to, say, write an essay on so-called women’s issues (feminism, sexism, discrimination against women, and so on) because they feel it may be politically incorrect, or that it’s not their territory. If a male scholar writes a study of a female novelist, does he fear allegations of sexism, or mutterings that he just can’t understand? I don’t know, but I’m curious. There is plenty of informal gender policing that goes on.

It would take a lot of work to neutralize the most pernicious gender-othering that has already taken place. And it isn’t all so bad: there are countries that had or have female leaders, women are zealously pursuing their educations, and they’re not afraid to live alone in dwellings they pay for themselves. We can be entertained by tales of women fighting crime and solving mysteries in the popular media. We don’t have to discuss the work of female writers, artists, and musicians in gendered terms in order to see their art as inherently feminine, whatever that might mean. But the tendency to essentialize persists. Perhaps it always will. The corollary tendency to depict things that are easy to understand, such as a brilliant Einstein look-alike, disheveled and elbow-patched, must be reckoned with, as entertainment must necessarily avoid being too challenging (though I would love to be contradicted on this score). It’s challenging enough to admit women of a certain age onto the silver screen. Given the time it takes to acquire a high-level degree and an academic position, if female scholars were depicted in film and television, they couldn’t very well be twentysomething nymphets. If we involved them in amorous adventures, we would have to show the controversial spectacle of a mature (yet) sexual woman. Our horror at the notion that women over, say, thirty-five have sex at all is another topic altogether.

Achieving gender neutrality might be one of the hardest advances that we have to make. I am tentatively optimistic that we can ungender the concept of rationality itself. There are many female scholars already. But the issue is not simply that more women should accede to positions of intellectual power. The issue is that we may refuse to see them if they do.

Magdalena Kay is an associate professor of English at the University of Victoria. She is the author of two scholarly books and several articles.

When Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988, many people around the world took it much more seriously than I did. The book is about the clash, if not of civilizations, then of cultures: immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh trying to make lives in present-day Britain. (Rushdie, incidentally, was raised to have a “secular Muslim identity.”) The author wanted, in his words, to describe “how the world joined up, not only how the East flowed into the West and the West into the East, but how the past shaped the present while the present shaped our understanding of the past.” To enrich his narrative, Rushdie included episodes featuring Muhammad and the dawn of Islam. (The prophet he depicted, Rushdie writes, “was not called Muhammad, lived in a city not called Mecca, and created a religion not called Islam.” I think it’s safe to say that this is coyly disingenuous.)

The “satanic verses” of the book’s title refer to an apparently real moment when Muhammad affirmed that three pagan deities were, in fact, genuine deities. Joseph Anton, unfortunately, is rather vague about why Rushdie’s addressing this subject sparked a frenzied crusade against him and his novel. I had to turn to an odd but interesting little book, Daniel Pipes’s The Rushdie Affair (1990), to discover that Rushdie’s theological “crime” was to suggest that Muhammad’s endorsement of those deities was an example of cynical realpolitik.

To this day, Rushdie doesn’t believe that his novel is offensive to Islam or Muhammad (for what it’s worth, I agree with him). “The material derived from the original story of Islam was . . . essentially admiring of the Prophet of Islam and even respectful toward him. It treated him as he always said he wanted to be treated, as a man (‘the Messenger’) not a divine figure (like the Christians’ ‘Son of God’). It showed him as a man of his time, shaped by that time and, as a leader, both subject to temptation and capable of overcoming it.” Rushdie further explains that his prophet “flirted with compromise, then rejected it; and his unbending idea grew strong enough to bend history to its will.”

Of course, Rushdie’s conception of his work meant nothing to those who targeted him for destruction. (They weren’t all religious fanatics. Any number were shrewd, cold-blooded rabble-rousers and politicians.) “The match that lit the fire” began in India, after India Today ran an excerpt from The Satanic Verses and an accompanying article. By the time the Rushdie affair played out all too many years later, the novel was banned in a number of countries (including India, as well as throughout the so-called developing world); riots erupted in Islamabad (five demonstrators were killed by the police) and Kashmir (one killed); bookstores were bombed in London, Sydney and Berkeley; Penguin, the book’s publisher, was constantly threatened; the book’s Japanese translator was murdered, and its Italian translator and Norwegian publisher were almost killed. A British foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, claimed that Britons didn’t love the book. The pope, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the British chief rabbi expressed sympathy for Muslims who felt maligned by the novel (a perverse example of ecumenism if there ever was one). The Satanic Verses was publicly burned in Yorkshire. Early on during the crisis, a Gallup poll reported that “four in five British Muslims … believe that some sort of action should be taken against [Rushdie].”

The cynosure of the berserk, brutal turmoil was poor Rushdie. On Valentine’s Day, 1989, Iran’s religious-political autocrat the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death-penalty fatwa (generally, a fatwa is an Islamic religious edict): “I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the ‘Satanic Verses’ book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Qur’an, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all Muslims to execute them wherever they find them.” For the next thirteen years, Rushdie would be guarded by the British security services, particularly the Special Branch, an elite unit of Scotland Yard. For most of those years, his life was pure hell.

The police insisted that Rushdie have a code name. So he created “Joseph Anton,” which combined the first names of two of his favorite writers, Conrad and Chekhov. The name came to irritate him, but that was the least of his problems. I can only touch briefly here on what Rushdie had to endure while facing a death sentence. For years he had to borrow domiciles from friends and acquaintances, or purchase or rent homes (he was damned lucky that, unlike most authors, his writing was highly remunerative).

Everything he did was closely monitored by his bodyguards. They often discouraged him from travelling anywhere, or even meeting with his son and the woman who would become his third wife. And while many friends and colleagues were incredibly supportive and altruistic, he knew that there were important individuals in the British intelligence and security forces, and in the government, who disdained him, who believed he was responsible for his plight (he wasn’t), and would have been happy to cast him adrift to fend for himself.

The lowest point for Rushdie probably came in late 1990. Overwhelmed by despair, he was manipulated by a group of British Muslims into declaring that he was a believing Muslim. (At least I think that’s what he declared; again, Rushdie’s description of this episode is somewhat obscure.) His cooperation (whatever it entailed) inevitably didn’t relieve the pressure. (Today, the writer is a proud atheist.)

Rushdie eventually came to realize that to withstand the bestial campaign aimed at him, he would have to assertively reclaim his life, and he slowly and diligently set about doing so. He visited friends, attended writers’ gatherings, managed to find airlines that would fly him to points abroad, remarried twice (his third and fourth wives), and fathered a second son. And he wrote: three novels and numerous short stories and nonfiction articles.

The United States, I’m pleased to say, was in some ways more politically and morally sympathetic toward Rushdie than his own country and government. He summered in the Hamptons and spent time in New York City in relative freedom. President Bill Clinton and members of his administration were supportive.

In 2002 the Special Branch informed Rushdie that the threat level had been substantially lowered. Perhaps the nightmare, like a disease, had simply run its course and disappeared. Perhaps the Iranian government—or elements within it—decided that it wanted better relations with the West and the fatwa was an impediment. Perhaps even fanatics reach a point where they just want to move on. The writer and the British government decided that the security precautions were no longer necessary. After thirteen years, Rushdie got his life back. Joseph Anton became Salman Rushdie again. Ironically, I think it likely that the many vocal haters of Rushdie and The Satanic Verses never read the novel. This leads me to believe that Rushdie and his book were almost irrelevant to the Rushdie affair, except as convenient symbols of what actually prompted the controversy and mayhem: the Occident, which the Muslim masses and their demagogues profoundly hated.

In Joseph Anton, Rushdie refers to himself in the third person, which can sometimes be confusing, but for the most part the book’s prose is precise and clean. And naturally, Rushdie’s tale is so shocking, so sublimely bizarre, it easily eclipses the magical-realism tropes of his fiction. A New York Times reviewer complained that Rushdie uses his memoir to settle scores. And it’s true that two ex-wives and sundry politicians, government bureaucrats, publishing world figures, and other writers are deprecated (or worse) by Rushdie. Moreover, there are times when I found him somewhat unctuous. When he’s finally allowed to return to India, he calls it “a homecoming party.” Was it really? Though born in India, Rushdie was educated in two of Britain’s most eminent, exclusive schools, Rugby and Cambridge, and he’s lived most of his life in the United Kingdom. Anyone who has heard him lecture or interviewed knows exactly what Rushdie is: a British intellectual and nob. And it’s curious that a serious writer should be so enamored of hobnobbing with the likes of Will Smith, Madonna, and Bono.

Know what? That sort of carping is probably mean-spirited and silly. Rushdie has earned the right, after his appalling ordeal, to be occasionally waspish in his book, to vent, to be sometimes sanctimonious and starstruck. And after all, it’s his memoir. I hope the rest of his life is tranquil, happy, and very productive. Zei gezunt, Salman Rushdie.

Howard Schneider is a writer and editor

In her extensive investigative reporting, Stewart describes a plan that, for its cupidity could bring charges of fraud in our (allegedly demonic) secular world but that seems wholly holy in the evangelical one. It has as its mission the subversion—and if that fails, the disappearance—of the public school.

Calling itself a grassroots project, the Good News Club already exists in several thousand U.S. elementary schools. While the clubs claim to be local initiatives, Stewart found in her investigation that “the ideas, the money, the legal firepower that make them possible are national.” She identifies conservative legal groups such as the Alliance Defense Fund, Liberty Counsel, and the American Center for Law and Justice as “groups whose leaders write the scripts that are followed in classrooms, playgrounds, and courtrooms from New York to California … that with combined budgets totaling over $100 million per year have masterminded the religious assault on public education.”

The Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), which sponsors the Good News Club, is the international evangelical nonprofit behind this plan and is proud of its success evangelizing and “discipling” children (read: teaching them to proselytize other children) for over seventy years. Its publication catalogue includes offerings like Special Agents for Christ: Kids Reaching Kids, described as six upbeat training sessions in which “kids will learn the Gospel message, use the GF2 [Gospel Flipper-Flapper], see demonstrations of a child like them sharing the Gospel, practice sharing the Gospel with a friend and be challenged to become ‘special agents’ winning their world for Christ!” The Special Agent Codebook is also offered to “give kids an easy-to-use and fun reference helping them remember the important points of the Gospel message. The fill-in-the-blank format solidifies their learning.”

The purpose of CEF and its associates no doubt seems pure to them—save the sinner. But they ignore a bit of theological (even of secular) wisdom, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Few of CEF’s activities benefit from what we know about how children grow and learn. As method and model, they appeal to baser motives of human conduct, such as self-righteousness, elitism, and bribery, in order to achieve one’s ends, and dishonesty in order to convert the other to one’s purposes. At the same time the Good News Club and its evangelical colleagues condemn as immoral liberal religion, nontheists, humanists, and anyone else challenging their worldview. Stewart’s book is a case study of the righteous lie and its dangers.

In Chapter 10 of The Good News Club, titled “The Peer-to-Peer Evangelism Loophole,” Stewart describes deliberate and skillfully camouflaged efforts that go beyond the elementary school level. These include the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which promotes regular prayer as part of its activities. Another example is the Life Book Movement, a project of Gideons International, by which Bibles and related material are given to Christian high school students to pass out to classmates, thereby staying within the law since the books aren’t being distributed by school staff or other adults. “It’s like we’re helping students smuggle God’s Word into a closed country (public high schools) to reach an unreached people group because studies show that only 4 percent of today’s teenagers are Bible-believing Christians,” Life Book President and CEO Carl Blunt was quoted as saying by the Christian Broadcasting Network’s Church Watch blog.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

In forty-five words, freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition are protected. In the many more words typical of attorney and judge, the meaning, history, intention, and justice of these words never ceases to be argued. In Chapter 4, “The Originalists’ New Theory,” Stewart looks at how, in the quarrel between freedom of religion and freedom of speech, the First Amendment becomes its own enemy. She begins with Widmar v. Vincent, a 1981 case on which the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 “that the exclusion of the religious group [from college campus facilities] amounted to an impermissible violation of that group’s free speech rights. The case was noteworthy because it suggested that matters involving religion and education could be judged on free speech grounds.” This led to the thinking, Stewart writes, that “the proper way for the state and its schools to remain neutral about religion is not, as the postwar consensus maintained, to exclude religion altogether, but rather to include religion in any and all forms on a par with secular viewpoints on all subjects.”

After discussing a number of cases from the 1990s, many argued before the Supreme Court by the lead attorney for the American Center for Law and Justice, Jay Sekulow, Stewart arrives at the 2001 decision in Good News Club v. Milford Central School. Here the court ruled 6-3 in favor of the Good News Club, which had been denied access to the public school’s grounds in upstate New York to establish a Club.

“The judicial strategy of the Christian Right advanced by people like Sekulow and validated by judges like [Antonin] Scalia and [Clarence] Thomas, considered in most general terms, amounts to an effort to turn civil rights law on its head,” Stewart declares. “It is an attempt to use the principle of tolerance to secure a place for intolerance, discrimination, and religious bigotry in the public schools and elsewhere. It is an attempt to protect the right of one group within society to take away the rights of others. So far, it has been working very well.”

In voicing her alarm at the success of the evangelical Christian right to infiltrate public schools in the United States, Stewart is careful to characterize many of those she came to know in her research as “caring and generous individuals who shared moments of their lives and taught me a great deal.” And while she’s sure many of them mean well for the children in their care, she concludes:

that all of their good intentions have been harnessed in service of a national agenda that will ultimately erode our communities and undermine our public schools. The goal of the national movement behind the assault on public education is to turn America into a “Christian Nation.” I am not worried that they might succeed. I am worried about the damage that they will cause when they fail, as I suspect they will in a society as inherently open and pluralistic as ours. And I am alarmed that we have allowed them to get so far so fast.

Indeed, it seems to have happened so fast that I somehow missed all the church/state opinions that have permitted the evangelical right to claim legality as it invades the public school. Hence, my gratitude to Katherine Stewart even if I come late to the party. The Good News Club offers a wealth of information and insight, written clearly and responsibly. My confession of ignorance is further grounds for recommending it, since I suspect that I am not alone.

Howard B. Radest, PhD, is dean emeritus of the Humanist Institute and a member of the Council of Ethical Culture Leaders. He is the former director of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and a former chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Moral Education. He serves on the advisory committee of the Kochhar Humanist Education Center and is listed in Who’s Who and Who’s Who in Education. His books include Can We Teach Ethics? (1989), Community Service: Encounter with Strangers (1993), and Ethics and Public Health in a Time of Terror (2006).

I’ll admit that part of the reason I smile when I read this is because it’s spelled and punctuated correctly. But there’s more to it—a student wrote that note. It’s something to think about.

I have always loved teaching. I love sharing what I know. I love seeing the glow when a student gets it and realizes they can achieve excellence. I love watching worlds open up. I love being around young people on the cusp of life—fully aware and capable of thinking and questioning and growing. Their lives flutter with possibility.

But there are days when it’s hard to smile. As a fellow teacher posited to me: “It shouldn’t be this hard to be a kid.” A student discovers she will be homeless this weekend, and the boy across the room hasn’t had a full meal since his free lunch ticket expired two weeks ago—his mother is too embarrassed to fill out the forms. Another girl couldn’t go home last night because the crack dealer next door burned out the entire apartment building, and the boy beside her couldn’t go home for other reasons. One boy sees violence as an inevitable solution because it’s the only one he’s ever seen garner results. Another won’t listen to facts if they favor a viewpoint other than his own.

I’ve often been told that teenagers think they’re immortal. They don’t. They behave like cocky animals and they talk big and they take risks and make stupid choices because they know they’re going to die. They’re terrified and worry their lives will end before they can make a difference in the world.

“What does Egypt look like?” a female student asks during a class discussion about protests around the world, including the strategies of Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. “Is it sandy like in the desert? Are there buildings like in India with goats in the streets?” I talk about Cairo’s 17 million people and modern hotels, adding, “but yes, there is sand.”

“What do they want?” she asks. “Why are they in the streets?”

I tell her I can’t say for sure, but that they probably want the same things she does. They want a free country, they want some power over their lives.

I’m intrigued by her questions. This student has been practically nowhere and seen almost nothing. Usually shy, she stares off, perhaps imagining camels and traffic jams. “I want to go and see it,” she says.

Not one student in three classes has ever heard of Thoreau before today. A few recognize the name of Gandhi. “Mahatma,” one boy suggests.

“That means  ‘great soul,’” I inform them.

One girl knows he went on a hunger strike to protest British rule in India. But no one has ever heard of how American men and women sat down at luncheon counters to order a cup of coffee and were abused, spat upon, beaten, and finally arrested merely because they were black. My students are shocked. I hope they’re equally impressed by the courage of those sitters who took abuse to call attention to injustice, and were incarcerated in order to publicize their goals. They have their place in making the world a better place. We talk about that.

The goal in school is to get an education, but for some students the overwhelming goal is survival. They are hungry, homeless, embarrassed by their clothing, their transportation, and by their families. They have no quiet place to study and no one at home to encourage them. They have undiagnosed and untreated health and emotional issues. They deserve so much more than they have. They deserve someone to expect more from them. All of them—every one—wants to be successful, but only rarely do they have a personal, practical, or emotionally satisfying image of what success looks like.

“Make a list of things you want to do before you’re old,” I tell them.  “A bucket list,” they say back. They want to graduate and make money. They want to make their parents proud. Some say they want to buy their mom a house. Or go to Egypt. One wants to dance in the street in Chelsea. It’s good that they dream. They need these grand and beautiful dreams.
Too often high school culture concerns nothing much beyond sports and clothing, grades and money. Earning a living is necessary, but money by itself is a sterile goal. They worry too much about prom—it’s unlikely they’ll ever get to dress that way again—and not enough about mathematics. They read all their friends’ posts on Facebook and not nearly enough novels or history books. They use technology without mastering it. They know how to slip through the system without understanding that it’s here to serve their future. They earn grades without gaining an education. They worry about the wrong experiences of high school.

I can’t say who is at fault. Parents tell them the great lie: this is the best time of your life. I warn them that it shouldn’t be true. Life doesn’t go downhill after age eighteen. “It’ll get better,” I tell them. There is so much more.

Teachers try to provide incentives and rewards. I see possibility spread out before my students, waiting for them to find their way. I try to throw doors open to the world, but find students are too busy keeping on their feet to venture out. I see the world wide open to them, but they fear electric fencing. They fear failure. They fear the future. And because of these fears, some of my students will remain right where they are all their lives, turning in ever smaller circles, wearing a hole in their own tiny scrap of rug. I’d like them to fly. Get on a magic carpet and out the door. I’d like them to know the world.

Smile, you’re beautiful. Who wrote it? I wonder. All these students who walk the halls of my school—the future is still open and some of them will make beautiful lives despite bumps along the way, and they’ll return one day to tell about it. And even on a day like today when too many children are moving in frightened circles, I smile. They’re beautiful.

Pretty much every atheist or humanist I know has gotten this question. It’s often asked in a smug, passive-aggressive way by religious believers who seem to think it’s a real zinger, a deal-breaker of a question that we’ve somehow never contemplated. But it’s sometimes asked in all sincerity, by religious believers who genuinely can’t comprehend what meaning itself could even mean without a divine creator handing it to us from on high. And of course, we humanists ask it ourselves. We ask it of each other—and answer it for each other—when we’re presenting a positive, public face of happy, ethical, meaningful atheism. And we ask it of ourselves in private, in all sincerity, in our long dark nights of the soul-less. The thorny question of life’s meaning isn’t magically answered by a belief in God—but it doesn’t magically disappear when we let go of that belief, either.

When humanists consider this question of meaning without God, of what gives us meaning and how we create it, we often answer with The Big Things. Love. Art. Marriage and family. Friendship. Community. Charity work. Making the world a better place. The never-ending search for knowledge. All of which are awesome; all of which are central parts of how I create meaning in my own life.

But I’d like to add a few things to that list.

What brings meaning to my life? Donuts. Fashion magazines. Costume jewelry. Playing “Cards Against Humanity.” Pretentious overpriced cocktails with a lot of silly crap in them. Fooling around on Facebook. Looking at cute cat videos on the Internet, over and over and over again. TiVoing the Olympics and watching the really obscure sports we’ve never heard of. Coming up with a sexy, gorgeous, wildly inappropriate outfit to wear to the Dyke March. Padron peppers sautéed in hot olive oil until they blister, then sprinkled with coarse sea salt. Sitting on the sofa watching Project Runway and letting cats crawl all over us. The never-ending search for a perfect cup of decaf coffee.

I want to speak in praise of frivolity.

When we don’t think there’s any god or any afterlife, when we think this short life is all we have, then the meaning of that life is pretty much framed within that life, and by the experiences we have in it. To some extent we can frame life’s meaning in terms of a future extending beyond it: our children living after us, our work and ideas surviving us, the ripples of how we affect other people continuing to ripple out after the stone of our life has sunk to the bottom of the pond. But if the meaning of our lives is focused on other people, then what meaning do their lives have? If we exist to make other people happy, and they exist to make other people happy, and so on and so on… at what point does that end?

At some point, doesn’t experience get to just matter, simply because it matters?

Consciousness is amazing. The fact that, out of nothing but earth and water and sunlight, life developed—and then developed further into a form that could be aware of itself and its surroundings—that is amazing. And the fact that life has developed into a form that’s not just aware of itself, but is aware of other conscious beings and their consciousnesses, and is able to connect with them and understand them even in a flawed and limited way? That is amazing squared. As Carl Sagan said, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” Stars and planets and galaxies and so on are incredible… but they have no way of knowing they’re incredible without biological life that has the capacity for conscious experience. (Of course, as the comedian Emo Philips pointed out, “I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”)

And all of that experience is amazing. The experience of overflowing love I felt the day Ingrid and I got married was amazing. And the experience of deliciousness I felt this morning when I ate tangerines and drank coffee was amazing. The experience of deep accomplishment and connection with my community the day I published my book was amazing. And the experience of hysterical, uncontrollable giggles I felt when we were playing “Cards Against Humanity” at the hot chocolate and games party last weekend was amazing. The experience of connection I felt with Rebecca and Gerard in our intense conversation about queer history was amazing. And the experience of connection I felt with Ingrid in our ridiculous conversation about how cute our cats are (a conversation we’ve been having for over a year now, by the way) was amazing.

All of this amazingness matters.

Now, as it happens, I also think that frivolous pleasures make the Big Things possible, and more meaningful. Think about times in your life that have been action-packed and saturated with meaning: a week filled with major events in your work life and your love life and your family life and your community life and your creative life. They’re exhausting. It’s exhilarating to live like that for a while, but it gets overwhelming. It can’t be sustained. We need space surrounding the Big Moments—if we didn’t have it, the Moments would drown us and numb us, and they’d soon stop feeling so big. And of course, our Big Moments and our frivolous pleasures aren’t unconnected. The Big Moment of marrying Ingrid was more meaningful because of all the small, silly moments we’d shared up to then and would share afterwards. And our small, silly moments are more meaningful because we can feel the foundation of that Big Moment supporting them, and resonating through them.

But the frivolous bits of life aren’t just valuable because of their connection to the big bits. They’re valuable because they’re valuable. They’re valuable because they are the universe knowing itself, and experiencing itself, and taking joy in itself. They’re valuable because they are the conscious bits of the universe connecting with each other: Through one person handing a cup of coffee across a counter and another person smiling and saying, “Thank you.” Through one person designing a hot pink dress and another person wearing it and smiling when they catch their reflection in a window. Through one person painting a picture of a parrot on the sidewalk and another person snapping a picture of it and putting it on their blog. Through one person writing a silly song about thrift stores and another person sharing it with their friend and that friend humming it throughout their day. Through one person making a donut and another person biting into it and experiencing joy.

When we let go of the idea that life is only meaningful because of God, when we truly accept that meaning is ours to create, I think we can stop being size queens about meaning. When we let go of the idea that joy only matters when it brings glory to the omnipotent creator of the universe, I think we can let all joy matter.

Greta Christina is a widely read and well-respected atheist blogger. She is also the author of Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless (Pitchstone Publishing), is a regular contributor to AlterNet, and has been published in Ms., Salon, Skeptical Inquirer, Free Inquiry, and the Chicago Sun-Times.

In Abington Township School District v. Schempp, the high court struck down mandatory, coercive, and school-sponsored forms of religious worship in public schools. The 8-1 decision was a powerful reaffirmation of religious freedom and parental rights, by which the court declared definitively that the public school system, as an arm of the government, has no business compelling youngsters to pray or read the Bible.

Religious conservatives weren’t pleased. Almost immediately they began lobbying for a school prayer amendment to the Constitution. Dozens of proposals were introduced in Congress, and hearings were held sporadically throughout 1964.

In the Senate, the leading proposal was the Dirksen Amendment, named for its sponsor, U.S. Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-IL). The amendment passed the Senate Judiciary Committee but failed on the Senate floor. There it received a simple majority of 49-37 but fell short of the two-thirds majority required to pass a constitutional amendment. The Schempp decision survived, and every subsequent attempt to nullify it via constitutional amendment has failed as well.

Behind every case like this there is a human face. In the Schempp ruling, that face belongs to Ellery Schempp, who in the early 1960s was a brave high school student in suburban Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania law at the time mandated that public schools open the day with recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and a reading of ten verses from the King James Version of the Bible. These fundamentally Protestant practices rankled lots of families. but Schempp came from a family of activists and, when he decided to take this issue on, they were firmly in his corner. Backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Schempps won a victory that has shaped church-state law for fifty years.

As Schempp’s case was winding its way through the courts, Madalyn Murray O’Hair was challenging school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading in Baltimore, Maryland, public schools on behalf of her son William. The two cases reached the Supreme Court at the same time, which consolidated them.

After the decision came down, the plaintiffs took sharply different paths in life. Ellery Schempp went on to college; Madalyn Murray O’Hair formed American Atheists. And many years later William Murray switched sides and became a right-wing Christian evangelist. He now attacks the decision that bears his name, Murray v. Curlett.

But Schempp never wavered from his commitment to church-state separation. His parents, Ed and Sidney, were active in various causes and passed that spirit on to their children. After high school, Schempp focused on education and then work, but as an adult he remained involved in a number of civil liberties and social justice issues. In 1993 I tracked him down for a story I was writing about the thirtieth anniversary of the case. I’m pleased to say that we’ve been friends ever since.

Now retired, Ellery Schempp often talks about his case at Unitarian-Universalist churches, humanist meetings, colleges, and other venues. Last year he spoke at Harvard Divinity School, telling the crowd, “One of the things that’s so disappointing to me is that fifty years after the Supreme Court decision, we’re still fighting some of the same battles. You’d have thought they would’ve abated by now.”

Indeed. But the simple truth is that some people have never made their peace with the school prayer rulings. Aside from promoting school prayer amendments, religious right groups have tried various schemes over the years to get around the decision.

A common tactic is to promote so-called “student-initiated” prayers. The thinking here is that if the prayers are offered by students as opposed to school officials, they’ll pass court muster. They won’t because they’re still coercive. The Supreme Court, in a decision handed down in a 2000 case dealing with student-led prayers before high school football games, made that clear. But state legislatures won’t give up. Some have even tried calling prayer something else. Florida has a law on its books allowing students in public schools to deliver “inspirational messages.” So far, no school system has dared implement it. They know they’ll be sued.

Earlier this year, Mississippi adopted a new law that requires public schools to develop policies that will allow students to lead prayers over public address systems and at school-sponsored events. Legal experts say the measure isn’t likely to fare well in federal court.

In Missouri, voters went so far as to approve an amendment to the state constitution that purportedly protects voluntary prayer in public schools.

Of course, voluntary prayer is permitted. That’s never been an issue. The right of a student to engage in a private, non-disruptive prayer at any point during the school day is secure. Religious right activists have deliberately distorted the Schempp ruling to imply that it banned all forms of school prayer. It didn’t. Only coercive, school-sponsored prayer was tossed.

And good riddance to it. It was always unworkable. (Interesting fact: the first people to speak out against school prayer were Roman Catholics in the latter half of the nineteenth century. They filed lawsuits against it in state courts and won many of them.) Now our country is more diverse than ever. No “one-size-fits-all” prayer could possibly be devised. Even if it were, truly religious people wouldn’t care to recite it—and it would still alienate nonbelievers.

A better idea is to listen to the words of Justice Tom Clark, who wrote the Schempp opinion. Clark observed, “Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment. But the exercises here do not fall into those categories. They are religious exercises, required by the States in violation of the command of the First Amendment that the Government maintain strict neutrality, neither aiding nor opposing religion.”

Our public schools should be neutral on questions of theology, and the men and women who work in them should recognize that the religious beliefs (or non-beliefs) of the students they teach are none of their business. Religion should be discussed only when it is relevant to the curriculum and then in an objective manner with the aim to educate, not indoctrinate.

Although we still have problems with inappropriate forms of religion in public schools, most institutions these days play by the rules and focus on teaching, not preaching. It has been that way for half a century now.

For that we can thank Ellery Schempp and his family.

Rob Boston is senior policy analyst at Americans United for Separation of Church and State and a board member of the American Humanist Association.

To understand everything,
all you need
is 10 numbers
and 26 letters

which is accurate
to the exact extent
that every lie has access
to that same truth.

Parable of Food

There is an abundance of food
and the children are hungry

which is a problem only because good food
must first be prepared properly

which means there will be a wait
because what is nourishing

is not available in a box that can be opened
and poured onto a plate

it must be sliced and seasoned
and simmered so that the flavors

careen into a satisfying meal that will
create a lasting craving for what is

better than the aftertaste of mediocrity
I want the children to wait

a little longer, the box within their reach
I want them to choose between

convenience and sustenance
I want them to know they will never be full.

DeMaris Gaunt studied art education at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, and is a full time glass and mixed media artist. She lives in Fishers, Indiana, with her husband and two children.