Wanted: a history of America's irreligious

Lincoln Mullen, who's writing a doctoral dissertation at Brandeis on "The Varieties of Religious Conversion," has an excellent post on Religion in American History on the possibility of a history of the not-religious, the irreligious. As Mullen notes, this is ground I'm exploring with the class I'm teaching on the history of American Atheism. This is a case, though, where the harvest is plentiful, the workers a pitiful few.

Mullen suggests attention should especially be paid to the non-eliete irreligious, if possible. He writes:

Irreligion was far more widespread than just among elites. If we trust work on the historical demography of American religion ... then there is reason to think that American religious history has neglected a lot of people. Simply put, if religion and specifically groups like Methodists, Baptists, and Catholics were growing constantly, and not just from immigration, then they had to grow from somewhere. Who were these secularists or 'nones'? The nineteenth century has bequeathed us competing explanations. The secularist explanation was that the more education one possessed, the further back one had pushed the superstitions of religion. Perhaps -- but only post-Darwin, and then only for elites. Much more persuasive is the shared assumption of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews that ignorance produced irreligion. Many of the vast nineteenth-century evangelistic enterprises, such as the Sunday school (Jewish as well as Christian), the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, the evangelical tract and textbook, and for that matter the public schools, were fundamentally educational. To hear Peter Cartwright tell it, he was constantly encountering (and wrasslin’ with) “rowdies” and skeptics. When colporteurs of the American Tract Society sold Bibles in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey in the 1840s, they found many people who, they claimed, “had never heard of Jesus Christ.” What would a religious history of those people look like?

The post also offers and excellent overview of the historical works currently available on American atheist, agnostic, freethinking, humanist, and ethical culture movements, and highlights a few things that are in the works.

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Printing

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Biography for a Calvinist

A biography ... invites the reader (as it demands of the author) to come to terms with the person at the center of the story. Readers are free to draw their own conclusions about [Abraham] Kuyper as they move along through this volume; I only hope to have supplied ample, nuanced evidence to make theirs a balanced judgement. Here is mine: Abraham Kuyper was a great man but not a nice one. He was immensely talented, energetic, and driven to great exploits. He appeared always confident, partly to quiet his own insecurities. He was an ambitious person who sought power, and often felt uneasy over that quest. He could be congenial and polemical, sometimes to the same person in fairly quick succession. He loved radical options and was typically more generous to opponents than to spiritual kin who differed with him on details. He loved having collaborators and disciples but drove them away when they stepped up as equals. In public he often showed a better understanding of God than himself. He majored in ideas -- Big Ideas above all -- with some impatience over the intricacies of mid-range policy or scholarly discourse as it evolved in its own deliberate way [....] 

I will thus pain Kuyper warts and all -- both the real ones and the ones that might seem like blemishes only to us. As a real Calvinist he would understand such a portrait, even though he might not like it. My critical observations are not meant to disparage his motives, his goals, or his achievements; indeed, these are remarkable enough to survive any record of his personal foibles. Just as Kuyper would own that he was in part a child of his times, so he would, ultimately, appreciate the citation I make, as a fellow Calvinist, from the apostle Paul, that the treasure of the gospel comes to us in earthen vessels to show that its transcendent power belongs to God (2 Cor. 4:7).

-- James D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat

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Science vs. religion vs. facts

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, perhaps America's most popular promoter of science, pointed out several years ago that there's no necessary conflict between science and religion. Not if you're being scientific about it. As a matter of a concrete fact, discoverable by investigation of the world around us, there are people who are scientists and religious, and there are likewise many religious people who embrace science. The idea that there's an intractable, inevitable, necessary struggle to the death between the two abstractions, "religion" and "science," is not supported by any evidence that can be discovered by an empirical investigation.

"The notion that if you're a scientist you're an atheist, or if you're religious you're not a scientist," Tyson said, "that's just empirically false."

Historians have made this argument for a long time. The "warfare model," the "conflict thesis" offered to explain the relationship between religion and science, just doesn't work.

Over a decade ago, Colin A. Russell wrote that the narrative frame of opposition dates back to two anti-religious science history books from the Gilded Age, both of which had political reasons rather than historical reasons to use that frame. There were axes to grind. The historiography was problematic. The evidence didn't support the guiding metaphors of opposition, struggle, and conflict. The narrative of an age-old fight, Russell showed, obscured a lot of important details. Missing from all such histories is the recognition of the many cooperative relationships and cases of close alliance between science and religion. Relatively minor squabbles are exalted, according to Russell, and normativized. Besides: the assertion of conflict has come to stand in for any actual historical explanation of the conflicts that did happen. Conflict thesis histories don't say why conflicts happened, but assume that they have to.

The whole thing is "at best an oversimplification and, at worst, a deception," Russell wrote.

At the time, Russell's thesis was pretty familiar to historians. Changes in the study of history in the 1980s and 1990s led to a near complete rejeciton of the story of a triumphant, progressive march of science through history that was so easily accepted in the 1870s, '80s, and '90s. Concern about "Whiggishness," "presentism," and the "retrospective fallacy" changed how things were done. Now historians' totem was "complexity," and a standard test for historians was whether or not they could persuasively, sympathetically present an account of a position or figure or movement with which they personally disagreed. According to David B. Wilson, "This radically different methodology yielded a very different overall conclusion about the historical relationship of science and religion." The simplicity of the story that these two traditions of knowledge and practice had always and everywhere of necessity been opposed, and also has always and everywhere been clearly distinguishable, became very suspect. And that simple story didn't stand up to suspicion very well.

Ronald L. Numbers assessment was more blunt. Way back in 1985 he said the conflict thesis was "historically bankrupt," and persisted only because of "cliché-bound minds."

"Cliché-Bound Minds" might have been a good title for the new documentary that premiered this week to a full house in Toronto. Instead the film, which features Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, and a raft of celebrities spouting about the conflict between science and religion, was titled The Unbelievers.

The first four showings of the documentary reportedly sold out, and the audience's response to the premiere was overwhelmingly positive.

Thank you to everyone who stood in line all day for The Unbelievers! You made it an amazing evening for everyone involved!
— The Unbelievers (@unbelieversfilm) April 30, 2013

Just finished world premiere of @unbelieversfilm . Standing ovation. Was one of the most remarkable and gratifying sights I can remember.
— Lawrence Krauss (@LKrauss1) April 30, 2013

The first review posted at Rotten Tomatoes confirms that the film is not exactly nuanced in its depiction of the relationship between science and religion. The audience reviewer reports: "Very good to see that there are people out there fighting for science, reason and intellect. Some great scenes of Muslim protesters being shouted down and heavily outnumbered."

The trailer also shows a woman in a hijab holding one of Krauss' popular books about science and looking very happy and shaking Krauss' hand. While that image could be understood as an example of the many ways people engage religion and science simultaneously, as this woman is both practicing her religion and engaging science without imploding, Krauss talks over the scene, interpreting it as a moment of liberation for the woman, freeing her from her crazy beliefs. He says "If you confront a belief they have and show them immediately that they can see for themselves that it's crazy, then they remember it."

Or perhaps it's just the condescension that sticks out so clearly in their minds.

The most problematic moment of the trailer, though, is when Krauss leans over a podium and says "There's no one whose views are not subject to question." The very obvious exception to this, given the tenor of the trailer and the rest of the promotional material about The Unbelievers, are those who have their own documentary made about them globetrotting from packed hall to packed hall like heroes to perpetuate a myth about a necessary conflict between science and religion.

The filmmakers could have at least given some space to Neil De´Grasse Tyson, a non-religious scientist who has questioned not only this false opposition but the value of Dawkins' rhetorical style, saying, for instance,

Your commentary had a sharpness of teeth .... Being an educator is not only getting the truth right, but there's got to be an act of persuasion in there as well. Persuasion isn't always, 'here's the facts and either you're an idiot or you're not'. It's, 'here are the facts, and here is a sensitivity to your state of mind.' And it's the facts plus the sensitivity, when convolved together, creates an impact. And I worry your methods, and your -- how articulately barbed you can be, ends up simply being ineffective.

This film at least appears to be untroubled by this or any other serious question, though.

The real question that this documentary raises, though, is why there's such a market for the conflict thesis. Why does it persist in its obfuscations and false oppositions so long after it was demonstrated to be historically bankrupt as a theory and demonstrably empirically false? It's an entirely contingent historical fact that Dawkins and Krauss and others would be so warmly hailed as they preach this message. It's not necessarily the case that it makes sense to score their speaking tour to rock anthems in a documentary that gets a standing ovation in Toronto. It would be good to have a good historical account to explain the accident of time and place that is The Unbelievers.

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Robert Ingersoll in his own time

1. A portrait of the famed anti-religious orator at middle age, circa 1880, taken by famed Civil War photographers Matthew Brady and Levin Handy. The Library of Congress title for the portrait is "Robert Ingersoll (The Infidel)":

2. A recording of Ingersoll -- of of the few -- on the subject of hope.

The prejudiced priest and the malicious minister say that I am trying to take away the hope of a future life. I am not trying to destroy another world, but I am endeavoring to prevent the theologians from destroying this. 

The hope of another life was in the heart, long before the 'sacred books' were written, and will remain there long after all the 'sacred books' are known to be the work of savage and superstitious men. Hope is the consolation of the world.

3. The New York Times on Ingersoll's courtroom defense of an ex-minister against allegations of blasphemy. C.B. Reynolds, chairman of the American Secular Union, had distributed pamphlets entitled "Blasphemy and the Bible," which said that the Bible was blasphemous in depicting God as a bloodthirsty monster. The news report was headlined "Blasphemy in New Jersey," and read:

For six months no topic was so interesting to the public as this. It monopolized attention at the stores, and became a fruitful subject of gossip in social and church circles. Under such circumstances it was to be expected that everybody who could spare time would go to court yesterday. Lines of people began to climb the court house hill early in the morning. At the hour of opening court the room set apart for the trial was packed, and distaffs had to be stationed at the foot of the stairs to keep back those who were not early enough. From nine thirty to eleven o'clock the crowd inside talked of blasphemy in all the phases suggested by this case, and the outsiders waited patiently on the lawn and steps and along the dusty approaches to the gray building.

Eleven O'clock brought the train from New York and on it Colonel Ingersoll. His arrival at the court house with his clerk opened a new chapter in the day's gossip. The event was so absorbing indeed, that the crowd failed entirely to notice an elderly man wearing a black frock suit, a silk hat, with an army badge pinned to his coat, and looking like a merchant of means, who entered the court house a few minutes behind the famous lawyer. That last comer was the defendant.

All was ready for the case. Within five minutes five jurors were in the box. [....] Colonel Ingersoll induced the Court to let him examine the five in the box and promptly ejected two Presbyterians.

Thereafter Colonel Ingersoll examined every juror as soon as presented. He asked particularly about the nature of each man's prejudice, if he had one. To a juror who did not know that he understood the word, the Colonel replied: 'I may not define the word legally, but my own idea is that a man is prejudiced when he has made up his mind on a case without knowing anything about it.' This juror thought he came under that category.

Presbyterians had a rather hard time with the examiner. 

4. Ingersoll, as represented on the cover of The Truth Seeker, the most successful freethought paper of the Gilded Age:

5. Robert L. Taylor, the Democratic Governor of Tennessee who once famously campaigned against his own brother, eulogizing the late Great Agnostic upon Ingersoll's death in 1899:

I saw him, like the serpent of old, worm himself into the paradise of human hearts, and by his seductive eloquence and subtle devices of sophistry inject his fatal venom, under whose blight its flowers faded, its music was hushed, its sunshine was darkened, and its soul was left a desert waste with the new-made graves of faith and hope.  

I saw him, like a lawless and erratic meteor without orbit, sweep across the intellectual sky, brilliant only in its self-consuming fire, generated by friction with the indestructible and eternal truths of God. 

That man was the archangel of modern infidelity, and I said: “How true is holy writ, which declares that the fool has said in his heart: ‘There is no God!’”

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Teaching the history of American atheism

There are more than a few resources available to those who would teach on atheism, so long as they conceive of atheism in philosophical terms. There are anthologies, and college course syllabi available online, and a more-or-less established sense of what would be included in such a course.

For those interested in teaching on the history of atheism, this isn't the case.

Personally, I became interested in atheism as a historical phenomena when thinking about how to explain the relationship between the New Atheists and the cultural changes at the turn of the century -- the terrorist attacks of 2001, the election of George W. Bush, and the rise of blogging in particular. While the arguments being advanced by New Atheists were, from the most part, not directly speaking to their political and cultural context, those things seemed relevant nonetheless. They're relevant not necessarily in terms of evaluating the arguments being made, but in terms of understanding why the arguments were what they were, and why they were being made in the ways they were. It seemed, further, that in the atheism debates that sprang up in the first part of the 21st century, atheism was consistently being treated as one thing, a timeless and unchanging philosophy. But when one looks at actually existing atheism, there are always multiple movements and counter-movements and many contested claims about coextensive commitments that come along with atheism.

Atheism, that is to say, is always, in history, atheisms. In the plural, they are, I find, more complex, more fraught, and more alive than they're generally made to seem in popular, public conversations.

Thinking about atheism ahistorically means leaving out a lot of interesting and arguably important aspects of the atheisms that people hold to and live their lives with.

Approaching the subject as history, on the other hand, allows one to focus on at least two important issues. One, what cultural conditions contributed to and determined the shape and tenor of various atheist movements, and two, what effect those movements had and have on the culture. Approaching atheism historically can mean (for example) allowing for the space necessary to think about how different political environments and philosophies were hospitable to different movements of atheists at different times -- why, for example, Republicans in the Gilded Age gladly counted Robert Ingersoll as one of their own, while in the first decades of the 20th century atheists were associated and affiliated with the more radical strains of the politics of the left.

As far as I can tell, the only readily available historical works on atheism tend towards hagiography, or are designed to be dismissive, so that "history" means either "model for moral instruction" or "refutation." Such approaches aren't great, academically. While they may be useful for arguing for atheism or against atheism, they're not helpful in teaching about atheism, which is what I want to do.

I am trying to teach the history of American atheism(s) this semester. I've had to create my own canon, to do that, with a bit of very helpful advice. With the thought that there may be others interested in teaching such a course, or anyway, general interest in approaching atheism as aspect of American history, I offer my course schedule reading list here, along with some explanatory notes.

In selecting the assigned readings, I kept two principals in mind: One, representitiveness; Two, accessibility.

It quickly became evident that it would not be possible to be comprehensive, given limitations of a semester. But I wanted readings that would adequately represent the various movements of atheism in American history, give students a vairly complete overview, and I wanted to have selections that would sufficiently present the particular thinkers and their arguments. Also I wanted readings that would not give my students -- mostly in their first years of university, coming from a wide variety of educational backgrounds, from a number of different disciplines -- too much trouble. Plus I had to be able to get ahold of the given readings and make them available to the students. With those limitations and goals, here's what I came up with:

15 April

Introduction; syllabus; definitions; review of classic arguments for the existence of God

22 April

Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

Selections from Age of Reason

Joel Barlow (1754-1812)

Selections from Joel Barlow: American Citizen in a Revolutionary World, by Richard Buel, Jr.

29 April

Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)

"Centennial Oration"; "Why I am an Agnostic"; selections from The Great Agnostic, by Susan Jacoby

Elizabeth Candy Stanton (1815-1902)

Selections from A Woman's Bible

6 May

Charles Chilton Moore (1837-1906)

Selections from Kentucky's Most Hated Man, by John Sparks

Blue Grass Blade

Selections from Letter from an Atheist Nation, ed. Thomas Lawson

13 May

William Graham Sumner (1840-1910)

"Religion and the Mores"; "That it is Not Wicked to be Rich; Nay, Even That it is Not Wicked to be Richer Than One's Neighbor"; "The Shifting of Responsiblity"; "Sketch of William Graham Sumner," by Albert Galloway Keller; "God and Man at Yale (in 1880)" by George Marsden

20 May

Max Eastman (1883-1969)

"The Religion of Patriotism"

Mike Gold (1894-1967)

"The Jesus-Thinkers"

27 May

H.L. Menken (1880-1956)

Selections from Damn! A Book of Calumny; Scopes trial reporting

3 June: NO CLASS 

10 June 

Humanist Manifestoes (1933; 1973)

17 June

Richard Wright (1908-1960)

Selections from Black Boy

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

Selections from Go Tell it on a Mountain

24 June

Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

Selections from Atlas Shrugged; Playboy Interview 1964

1 July

Madalyn Murray O’Hair (1919-1995)

Playboy Interview 1965, "The Murder of the Madalyn Murray O'Hair: America's Most Hated Woman," by Lona Manning

8 July

William Hamilton (1924-2012)

"The New Essence of Christianity"

Thomas J.J. Altizer (1927- )

"A Wager"

Make-up class:

Richard Feynman (1918-1988)

"The Relation of Science and Religion"; "Cargo Cult Science"

Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

"Pale Blue Dot"; selections from "The Varieties of Scientific Experience"

15 July

Daniel Dennett (1942- )

"The Bright Stuff"; "Atheism and Evolution"; "The Evolution of Misbelief"

22 July

Chris Stedman (1987- )

Selections from Faitheist

Conclusion; wrap-up 

A few thoughts:
1. It would be very easy to double the number of readings. There are lots and lots of people who are not here and could be here, though hopefully the above gives a good overview even though it's not comprehensive.
2. There were a number of people who I ended up leaving out because their work is limited mainly to criticizing instantiations of Chrisitanity, and they don't generally go beyond that. Examples range from 19th century abolitionists to 21st century media figures. I gave preference to works where epistemological and metaphysical claims are made.
3. If this could be expanded, it would be worth looking at those who were not atheists per se but attempted to establish secular alternatives to traditional religions, such as Felix Addler and John Muir. Such movements will be referenced in discussions of readings that are included, but there are limits on time that forced me to make some tough decisions.
4. With a few noted exceptions, fictional works on atheism were not included. While there would ideally be space for Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, etc., etc., there was a problem of accessibility. In some cases, non fiction versions of the author's arguments are easier to teach. In others, the issue of excerpting a short enough portion of text for a single undergrad class was very problematic. Additionally, teaching fiction is different than teaching argumentative essays, and switching back and forth too much presents a number of challenges.
5. There are only a few secondary texts, here, mostly in the first month of class. The secondary texts I've found tend to be very uneven. The hope, though, is that these texts will demonstrate to the students how one can take a primary text and situate it historically and read it in historical context, which the class will then do with the later texts.
6. Class time will be given to a combination of history lectures and group discussions explicating the assigned readings.

This is obviously a work in progress, but, I hope, a promising one.

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Psalms for sale

One of the few extant copies of the Bay Psalm Book, either the first book or one of the first books printed in what is now the United States (depending on your definition of "book"). The psalter is very small -- 6 inches by 5 inches -- and is one of only 1,700 printed by Massachusetts Puritans in 1640. The book goes on auction in November. It is expected to bring in more than $15 million. That money will go to Boston's Old South Church, the current owner, a United Church of Christ congregation that has been struggling financially.

The head of the auction house's book department said "It is a mythical rarity. Yet here it is today, this modest little book printed in the American wilderness but embodying the values that created our nation: political freedom and religious liberty."

Update: One of the bombs that went off yesterday at the finish line of the Boston Marathon (after I wrote this post) was outside the Old South Church. The church was not damaged. On their facebook page, they ask people to "Please continue to pray for those impacted by today's events."

[Cross-posted at Jonathan Edwards Center Germany].

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What an atheist learned while writing Atheism For Dummies

Dale McGowan, author of the recently released Atheism For Dummies, on 20 things he learned while writing the book:

No. 17 seems deeply methodologically problematic. And McGowan, in this talk at least, also seems to have a tendency to decontextualize nuanced theological statements from diverse historical periods and construe them as basically like contemporary anglophone atheism. There are important differences between points made in disputes during Islamic golden age philosophy and what the teenage McGowan was saying, which the adult McGowan seems to miss. I worry, too, about the extent to which the field of atheist history is being shaped by atheists' need for a canon and the drive to hagiography.

This is, of course, only the For Dummies series, but these things have a way of shaping popular understanding and public discussions.

The introduction of the book is available at The Friendly Atheist.

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A materialist account of historical possibility

A materialist account of historical possibility is interested not in motives for action but in the conditions that produce and contour such motives, the conditions in which our actions are iterated, and the conditions with which our actions interact to produce certain effects.... A materialist understanding of history does not imply that economic imperatives 'cause' or directly 'determine' human experience; rather, within a certain order of economic and attendant social relations, there are many possibilities for belief and action. But there are not infinite possibilities.

-- Wendy Brown, "The Sacred, the Secular, and the Profane: Charles Taylor and Karl Marx"

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A theory of famous and forgotten atheists

In the New York Times, in a review of Susan Jacoby's new book on Robert Ingersoll, there's a proposed theory of famous and forgotten atheists, and of why they're famous or forgotten. It's not clear if the theory is Jacoby's or the reviewers' (presumably it's Jacoby's), but this is the theory:

There have been atheists and religious doubters throughout history, but the ones who remain famous after their deaths tend to have been equally famous for something else as well; otherwise, people most notable for their bravery in the face of religious conservatism have to be celebrated by a population equally brave, and that is often too much to ask.

Is this true?

Besides the problem of the question of the definition of "atheist" and whether there have been those "throughout history," and how "atheist" and "religious doubter" are being mushed together, is this true?  Is there really any way to divide public religion-doubters in such a way as to predict their permanence, their public memory?

The model for the remembered atheist/religious doubter that is being proposed here would apparently be Thomas Paine; Ingersoll's the model of the forgotten atheist. Paine had the "something else" of the American Revolution and the French Revolution. But then, it's not like Ingersoll did nothing but doubt at the religious. He fought in the Civil War. He had an active political career.

Maybe it's just the vagueness of "something else as well" I am having a problem with. It seems very unclear what this wouldn't apply to.

Did Ayn Rand do something else? Probably that's how her other political and artistic efforts would be thought of here, though she might not have accepted those distinctions separating her philosophy from everything else. Did Madalyn Murray O'Hair do something besides atheist activism? It wouldn't seem so, but surely she counts as one who's remained famous. Emma Goldman could fit into the Paine model of an atheist who's remembered but who's "equally famous for something else." What about Marcet Haldeman-Julius? She did lots of other things besides doubt, but isn't particularly remembered, I don't think.

Besides, isn't it because one is remembered that multiple aspects of one's life and work are remembered?  Not the other way around.

The proposed theory of why remembered atheists are remembered elides over the many complications of the functions of discourses that publicly preserve a memory. In place of a more nuanced explanation for why some public figures remain that way after death and others do not, it slides into talk of "celebration" and "bravery." Which is to say, it into a case for a kind of hagiography.

The proposed theory seems like it's going to be a historical argument, an interesting explanatory device. But then it  seems like it turns out to be really something else entirely.

This is my concern with Jacoby's history of American freethinkers, and why I'm skeptical about her book on Ingersoll.

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Francis Schaeffer and the death of Baby Doe

Francis Schaeffer's 1982 message to the Presbyterians at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was pretty simple: the philosophy of modern society is humanism, and humanism means death.

The speech was part of Schaeffer's book tour for A Christian Manifesto, which had been published the year before. That book and tour, along with 1976's book and film series How Shall We Then Live? and 1979's book and film Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, all made a sustained argument about the need for Christian activism. The pro-life movement, as such, can be traced to these arguments; the religious right as a "bloc" and a single, mobilized, political entity, was formed in part by these efforts. Schaeffer made the historical and philosophical case that undergirded the emerging movement.

The argument was about attitudes towards life and death.

Attitudes exemplified by the issue of infanticide.

The case Schaeffer made to the Presbyterians hinged on claims about infanticide, its prevalence and its popular acceptability. His philosophical critique of modern America and his proscriptive solution of Christian action both depended on the accuracy of his cultural analysis. Both were dependent on the question of whether or not Schaeffer was right about the way the world was at that moment. For that reason alone, it's worth inquiring into the question of infants killed by doctors in 1982.

The answer to the question of whether or not Schaeffer was right about infanticide in 1982 will go some ways towards answering the questions of whether or not he was right about the modern world, and right or not about humanism.

Schaeffer's abstract, philosophical critique was a critique of humanism. This is constant throughout his work, and was essential to the point he was making in February 1982.

Schaeffer told the people at Coral Ridge:

What we are facing is Humanism: Man, the measure of all things -- viewing final reality being only material or energy shaped by chance -- therefore, human life having no intrinsic value -- therefore, the keeping of any individual life or any groups of human life, being purely an arbitrary choice by society at the given moment.

This is not an obvious argument. Humanism, as articulated in the two Humanist Manifestoes, explicitly and adamantly affirms the value of human life. The first Humanist Manifesto, written in 1933, concludes with the claim that humanism will "affirm life rather than deny it." The second Humanist Manifesto, written in '73, states that "the preciousness and dignity of the individual person is a central humanist value." Schaeffer is claiming that the humanists are wrong about what humanists believe. Or, more precisely, that they misunderstand the logical consequences of consistently holding to their humanist epistemology and ontology. They don't see the contradiction between denying God and excluding revelation and the supernatural from conversations about public policies, on the one hand, and upholding the value of human life on the other. For Schaeffer, the humanists may say that human life has value but they can't say it is intrinsically valuable, and that makes all the difference.

This is not just an abstract claim, though. Schaeffer was making an argument about what was actually happening in American at that moment. He claimed that this social development was visible: Humanism has taken over and has wrought death.

As evidence of this, he offered the current practice of doctors and nurses committing infanticide. Those who looked, he said, would see how humanism, in practice, meant the devaluation of human life:

Believe me, it's everywhere. It isn't just abortion. It's infanticide. It's allowing the babies to starve to death after they are born. If they do not come up to some doctor's concept of a quality of life worth living. I'll just say in passing -- and never forget it -- it takes about 15 days, often, for these babies to starve to death....

So what we find then, is that the medical profession has largely changed -- not all doctors. I'm sure there are doctors here in the audience who feel very, very differently, who feel indeed that human life is important and you wouldn't take it, easily, wantonly. But, in general, we must say (and all you have to do is look at the TV programs), all you have to do is hear about the increased talk about allowing the Mongoloid child -- the child with Down's Syndrome -- to starve to death if it's born this way. Increasingly, we find on every side the medical profession has changed its views. The view now is, "Is this life worth saving?"

This is not a philosophical claim. It's a claim, rather, about what was actually happening in 1982, and should be a matter of record, a claim that could be verified. Where arguments about what humanists "really" believe are not likely to go anywhere, it should be a simple enough matter to establish whether or not Schaeffer was right about what was happening in American hospitals in 1982. Note that he was not here making a slippery slope argument, saying that the legalization of abortion will at some future date end up meaning that infanticide is an accepted practice. That's common in pro-life rhetoric, and Schaeffer made that argument too, but that's not what Schaeffer was saying here. He was making the claim that there was a general practice in the medical profession -- i.e., an implementation of humanism -- such that certain sorts of infants were being starved to death.

Is this true?

Were newborns being regularly killed in American hospitals -- easily, wantonly, and so on?

No.

There's one particularly famous case from that same year that would seem, on one level, to confirm what Schaeffer argued. An infant born with Down's syndrome was allowed to starve to death in a hospital in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1982, two months after Schaeffer's Florida speech. Some of the basic facts might seem to confirm his claims, but the details of that case show that Schaeffer was wrong -- importantly -- about the majority attitudes towards life and death in American hospitals. The full story of the Baby Doe case, as it's called, seriously undermine Schaeffer's argument.

Here's what happened: a child was born on Good Friday, April 1982. He was born with Down's syndrome and a disorder of the digestive system, esophageal atresia. This meant he could not eat.

There were three doctors in the case. Two recommended transporting the infant immediately to another hospital where emergency surgery could be preformed. The surgery had a 90 percent chance of success. The third -- the doctor who actually delivered the child -- said that there was another option that the parents had to consider.

They could let their child die.

The third doctor, Walter Owens, said the surgery would be painful, and possibly only the first of many, and the child would still have Down's. He suspected there were also other issues, such as brain damage. He said the child would be a "mere blob." They had a choice and they needed to know they had a choice that they had to make.

The family, which had had experiences with children with Down's, decided to let their child die. Owens told them they were being courageous, and said, "Here's how I look at it. If you let the baby die, you're going to grieve a little while. But if you go ahead with this surgery, you're going to grieve for the rest of your lives."

To this point, the story seems to align exactly with what Schaeffer predicted. Owens was a Unitarian-Universalist, incidentally, which would also fit Schaeffer's cultural analysis of the betrayal of Reformed Christian worldview and its consequences.

The story goes on, however. One of the doctors recommending the emergency surgery -- who happened to be named Schaffer -- fought for the infant's life. He appealed to the hospital authorities, and they brought in a judge on Saturday night to make a decision about this case. According to Jeff Lyons, who wrote the history of the Baby Doe case (1, 2, 3, 4), the judge was at home coloring Easter eggs with his children when the call came, and there was an emergency hearing at the hospital.

Lyons writes:

At issue was nothing less than whether parents ever have the right to refuse live-saving treatment for their children and whether a life of handicap is so abysmal as to warrant its termination at birth. 

Only rarely in American jurisprudence had such questions been raised. On the few occasions on which they had, the courts had almost invariably ruled against the parents and in favor of life. But in those instances the doctors had always been lined up against the parents. 

In Bloomington, however, it was a different matter. There existed a strong--one might say vehement--difference of clinical opinion as to what the best course of treatment was.

After hearing the evidence and the testimony of the conflicting doctors, as well as the arguments of the hospital's lawyers and a cleric, the judge took 30 minutes to deliberate. Then he ruled that it was not the court's place to make this decision: when a family is presented with two options by medical professionals, it is their right to make the choice about which course of action to take concerning a newborn infant. The family in this case had made their decision, and the child would die.

That wasn't the end of it, though.

The nurses revolted. A sign was taped to Baby Doe's crib saying "Do Not Feed." Possibly this was because of the problem with the infant's esophagus, but it was taken as a symbol of the parent's decision to starve their child. The head nurse saw the sign and responded: "Over my dead body." En masse, the nurses threatened to strike.

Francis Schaeffer, from a certain perspective, seems prescient here. At Coral Ridge, two months before, he had said that nurses would be asked to participate in the death of infants. He predicted there would be signs on cribs that said "Do Not Feed," and that nurses would be fired if they refused to follow those orders. The nurses in Bloomington did refuse, though, and they weren't fired. The hospital took their side. Instead of firing the nurses, the child was moved out of the nursery, taken to another floor, and the family was required to hire private nurses.

There was also immediate, fierce criticism of the judge, and so the decision was referred to the state's Child Protection Committee, with a guardian appointed to represent the interests of the child in that hearing. After 45 minutes of deliberation, Lyons reports, the committee returned with the same decision, affirming the rights of the parent's to make this medical decision.

Neither the court nor the committee, it's worth noting, never made any sort of decision about the value of the infant's life, or about the ways in which, perhaps, quality of life could be measured against life itself. Rather, they considered and made a ruling about who has the right to the final decision about how to respond to an infant's serious medical condition when doctors disagree. They decided, very conservatively, that the state does not have the power, nor does the hospital. The rights are the parents', in consultation with their physicians.

There was another legal challenge the next day, when the county prosecutor tried to have the child declared neglected, giving the state the authority to overrule the parent's decision. That failed, and there were then a series of other efforts: a local attorney acting on behalf of the county prosecutor applied for a temporary restraining order agains the parents; a lawyer for the National Right to Life Association filed a petition on behalf of a couple that wanted to adopt Baby Doe; an appeal was made to the Indiana Supreme Court; plans were made to appeal to the Supreme Court.

All of these failed. Mostly for legal and technical reasons.

The parents, meanwhile, named the child Walter after Owens, the doctor who'd recommended they let him die. They had the infant baptized into the Catholic Church by their parish priest. They asked their nurses when the ordeal would be over.

Others continued to fight for the infant's life, nevertheless. Protestors gathered outside the hospital with signs. The doctor who strongly recommended the emergency surgery, Schaffer, tried to break into Baby Doe's room to administer an IV, to feed the dying child. Lyon's calls it "one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of American medicine, an episode that saw one doctor guard a dying baby from another doctor who was threatening to try and save its life." The rescue mission only stopped because it was too late. The doctor said he knew that feeding the dying infant intravenously could cost him his medical license or even result in criminal charges of kidnapping. But he didn't care. It was too late, though.

At six days old, denied medical treatment and denied food, Baby Doe died.

There don't seem to be any reliable figures to indicate how many similar cases occurred in the United States in 1982. It's just not known if, as Schaeffer said, such practices were "everywhere." The fact that this case received such attention, though, and evoked such a strong response, suggests that letting Down's children or otherwise handicapped children die was not common or commonly accepted. A similar case in 1983 received similar attention, and similarly garnered outrage from the public, the medical community and legal community, indicating that while there were some doctors doing this sort of thing, they faced overwhelming resistance.

Schaeffer's description of the culture, where "the medical profession has largely changed," is simply factually wrong.

But what should be made of this? It seems significant that he was wrong. Schaeffer's cultural analysis and his philosophical analysis in this 1982 speech depended very much on the truth of the claim that infanticide was happening, and happening without any resistance. The entire argument that he made in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., can be summed up with these two arguments that both rest on this purported fact of infanticide: modern society is humanist, humanism results in the devaluation of life, and thus the modern world is now a place where infants with Down's are being nonchalantly killed.

But they weren't, though. Not nonchalantly.

According to reports, even in such liberal quarters as the Washington Post, Baby Doe's death was considered a tragedy. The American Academy of Pediatrics expressed "open concern that Baby Does' obstetric physician had made a mistake, that poor advice was given to the family and that such an event should be avoided." An article published in the Western Journal of Medicine said the doctor made a "serious judgement error," because of his own prejudice and bias. The next year, in response to the public outcry, every hospital that received federal funding was required to prominently post signs announcing "discriminatory failure to feed and care for handicapped infants ... is prohibited by federal law." Several laws were passed, following the case. Reflecting on the case 20 years later, the judge who'd been called to the Bloomington hospital on Easter eve noted that "if this situation had happened in present-day courts, there would be no doubt all action would have been taken to save the baby's life because of new state and federal laws that prohibit such acts."

If Walter Owens received any support in this case, for his opinion that the child should be allowed to die, it wasn't very vocal. Even those who opposed the Baby Doe regulations went out of their way to make it clear that they thought the doctor made a horrible decision.

All of this points to the fact that Schaeffer was wrong. The reaction to the Baby Doe case shows that the America of 1982 was not the kind of place that Francis Schaeffer thought it was. While there may have been a few who, in specific cases, asked the question, "Is this life worth saving?," that was clearly not happening "on every side." When you look at what actually was the case, what you find is the opposite of what Schaeffer said would be found. People overwhelmingly wanted to keep this infant alive, and valued his life enough to try to get the government to take away the parents' legal rights.

Schaeffer's message, to Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and in those tours in 1976, '79 and '82, was about the dangers of humanism, and how Christians should wake up because humanism had taken over their world, reshaped their country, and put the lives of America's most vulnerable in jeopardy. In this specific instance, he made very concrete claims about how that was happening, but it's clear he was wrong.

Schaeffer's cultural analysis was mistaken.

The only possible conclusions, it seems, is that either he was wrong about humanism having taken over America, or, alternatively, it's just not the case that humanism devalues human life in the way Schaeffer said it did.

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Doubt in the library

Megan Phelps-Roper, once thought to be the future of Westboro Baptist's campaign to tell America how very much it is hated by God, has now left her grandfather's church.

As she told journalist Jeff Chu, doubt came, as it so often does, from questions of epistemology and a sense of the expanse of history. Megan's situation is unusual, but this thought process follows a well-travelled route.

Chu writes:

She kept trying to conquer the doubts. Westboro teaches that one cannot trust his or her feelings. They’re unreliable. Human nature 'is inherently sinful and inherently completely sinful,' Megan explains. 'All that's trustworthy is the Bible. And if you have a feeling or a thought that’s against the church's interpretations of the Bible, then it's a feeling or a thought against God himself.'

This, of course, assumes that the church's teachings and God's feelings are one and the same. And this, of course, assumes that the church's interpretation of the Bible is infallible, that this much-debated document handed down over the centuries has, in 2013, been processed and understood correctly only by a small band of believers in Topeka. 'Now?' Megan says. 'That sounds crazy to me.'

In December, she went to a public library in Lawrence, Kansas. She was looking through books on philosophy and religion, and it struck her that people had devoted their entire lives to studying these questions of how to live and what is right and wrong. 'The idea that only WBC had the right answer seemed crazy,' she says. 'It just seemed impossible.'

Phelps-Roper has left the church, and Topeka, and is currently trying to figure out what she does believe.

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The "nones" of 87 years ago

Most of the debates about the "nones" have had to do with interpretation. The question is, who are they? The question is, what does it mean?

A question that hasn't been so prominently raised is whether this new thing is really so new.

Charles Richter, of (Ir)religion in America, has turned up some evidence it's not. From the University of Illinois student newspaper in 1926, a letter from a student questioning the interpretations of a survey of university students' religious affiliations. According to the letter, only one student out of more than 10,000 identified as an atheist, but there were more than a few that were religiously unaffiliated.

The letter writer, who signs A.B.C, argues:

Shall we say that only one is an atheist and the rest are religious, but merely indifferent to church attendance, or shall we take into consideration the deadliness of Christian intolerance and admit that some of the 1,828 did not register as atheists for fear of ostracism? I am an atheist, but when I registered I did not admit that fact because I knew the registers would be made public, and some enthusiastic religionist might bring the information to the attention of the Great Christian Majority, to my discomfort.

There's a familiarity of this argument -- atheists need to "come out," and so on. This is a very contemporary debate, happening 87 years ago. While clearly the ranks of the unaffiliated have swelled since the days when less than two percent of university students said they didn't belong to any specific religion, the category of those who don't fit comfortably into a religious demographics survey, it turns out, is not new.

It's just that they didn't have a clever name for it in 1926.

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The political act of good history

History is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin addition. The past is an essential element, perhaps the essential element, in these ideologies. If there is no suitable past, it can always be invented. Indeed, in the nature of things there is usually no entirely suitable past, because the phenomenon these ideologies claim to justify is not ancient or eternal but historically novel .... 

In this situation historians find themselves in the unexpected role of political actors. I used to think that the profession of history, unlike that of say, nuclear physics, could at least do no harm. Now I know it can. Our studies can turn into bomb factories like the workshops in which the IRA has learned to transform chemical fertilizer into an explosive. This state of affairs affects us in two ways. We have a responsibility to historical facts in general, and for criticizing the politico-ideological abuse of history in particular. 

-- Eric Hobsbawm

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Culturally contested Christmas

A curious historical fact: the first people to work to "take the Christ out of Christmas," as it were, were not atheists, or crass materialists, or secularists/pluralists trying to diminish the role of Christianity in American culture. They were Protestants.

Protestants were very conflicted about Christmas in the 1800s.

For one thing, many were opposed to the "mass" part of Christmas, i.e., the Catholicism implicit in the holiday. If December 25 was a religious holiday, that seemed to mean accepting the Catholic tradition of the church calendar and the Catholic idea of tradition, the same tradition that led to the veneration of the Virgin Mary, the authority of the Pope and the church councils, and all the sundry things Protestants argued should be rejected because they're not in the Bible. The Bible which says nothing about a gift-giving solstice holiday.

At the same time, Protestants felt a strong impulse to take the cultural practice of the day -- the Christmas of the tavern, the Christmas of the department store -- and repurpose them as devotional practices.

This meant that they were at the same time critical of the non-religious celebrations of Christmas and leery of the religious celebrations too.

As Leigh Eric Schmidt writes in Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays:

Through much of the nineteenth century, the Christianization of Christmas was a quite fragile proposition, tentative and fragmentary. Every time a pastor tried to remind his congregation that Christmas was a solemn religious event that 'should be observed in the heart as well as at the hearth, in the temple as well as at the table,' he seemed to have to admit that the most visible observances of the season were 'rioting and vain amusement' -- shooting guns, callithumpian music, practical jokes, heavy drinking and the like. The churches were invariably hard pressed to communicate the devotional dimension of Christmas; the raucous plebeian version of the celebration always threatened to drown them out.

Confessedly, these Protestants in the Puritan mold were partially to blame for the sorry state of Christmas devotion in the colonial and antebellum worlds. The tradition of holiday purgation, long shared in by Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and many Methodists, bequeathed a model of thorough desacralization that actually helped Christmas go its secular way in American culture. Time and again these Protestants insisted that Christmas was just like any other day, that it was without 'any peculiar sanctity.' At best, Christmas was an object of 'mistaken piety'; at worst it was the occasion of superstition and corrupt tradition. Given these presuppositions about the idolatry of the ancient church calendar, when low-church Protestant began their home-centered recovery of Christmas in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, they often welcomed it back explicitly as a 'social holiday,'not as a 'religious observance.' As one Sunday School publication, the Baptist Teacher, editorialized in 1875, 'We believe in Christmas -- not as a holy day, but as a holiday.'

As has been regularly pointed out, the so-called "war on Christmas" is pretty specious. It is the case, though, that the meaning of Christmas is and has always been culturally contested. In its practice, this holiday is often conflicted, with multiple meanings, divergent rituals, discordant customs, and perpetually competing interpretations.

It's common today, for example, to find evangelicals at once upset that Christmas has been "commercialized" and that Wal-Mart clerks don't recognize the religious nature of the celebration in their standard customer greetings. This isn't a new thing, though; the conflict over what Christmas is has a long history. And it's not only the case of a conflict between the American Protestant majority and others, be they Catholic or non-religious. The conflict runs even through American Protestantism itself.

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What happened to Robert Ingersoll?

Susan Jacoby wonders why the 19th century's "Great Agnostic" Robert G. Ingersoll was more or less forgotten to history. One theory she suggests: it was liberals' smug confidence in their victory over fundamentalism after the Scopes trial. 

Jacoby writes:

Ingersoll's collected works were published within a few years of his death [in 1899] by his brother-in-law C. P. Farrell, who owned the Dresden Publishing Company (named for Ingersoll’s birthplace in upstate New York). The Great Agnostic remained a well-known, frequently cited figure into the 1920s, not only because many of his friends and enemies remained alive but also because his writings were still thought to be capable of corrupting American youth. 

The memory of Ingersoll faded swiftly, however, after the famous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, which pitted the leading spokesman for religious fundamentalism, William Jennings Bryan, against Clarence Darrow, the nation’s most famous criminal lawyer and an equally famous agnostic, who had been strongly influenced by hearing Ingersoll’s speeches in the 1870s and 1880s.

Jacoby has a biography of Ingersoll coming out in 2013.

I'm slightly suspicious of the question, here. There's an assumption that it's odd or abnormal for Ingersoll's presence to have faded or have been forgotten, an assumption that goes to support Jacoby's thesis about Ingersoll's significance without making an argument for his importance.

There is an interesting question here, though. To what extent did the "victory" in the Tennessee court house, as understood by those who were critical of religion, as represented by them to themselves, change the shape of skeptical arguments and the development of the atheistic cause?

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Thinking about religious books as commodities

Matt Hedstrom, American Studies professor at the University of Virginia and author of the recently released The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century, talking about his book on Virginia public radio.

Hedstrom starts with a brief, of sorts, for the book markets and book cultures, and why that study is important in the study of religion:

"Religions also always take on the characteristics of their moment, of their surrounding culture. When you think about the United States in the 20th century, and still in the 21st century, I think the most powerful cultural forces we've got are media and the consumer marketplace. We shape our identities so much through what we consume and how we choose to consume all kinds of commodities, and how we consume media in particular. And, for a lot of Americans, over the course of the the 20th century, the most culturally significant commodity that they bought were books."

Thinking about books as commodities and about how faith as currently, culturally understood, is constructed in the context of such market interactions between consumers and commodities has been one of the major developments of my thinking in my dissertation work. Hearing Hedstrom talk at the Religion and the Marketplace conference in Heidelberg, in Oct. 2011, spurred me on in this.

His book, I think, will be a good addition to the growing body of work on religious book cultures.

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Daniel Dennet discovers Erasmus

Daniel Dennett is notoriously horrible at history. It turns out, though, if you give him an award and €150,000, he is willing to do a little.

Here, in an interview with a Dutch journalist about how he won the Erasums award, he discovers Erasmus, and finds he has, at least in one specific sense he'll admit to, been preceeded.

Dennett: "It's a little bit eerie to discover that you're echoing a debate which is hundreds of years old. And some very similar points being made."

Indeed, Dr. Dennet. Indeed.

For an offhand -- and, I'd argue, deeplyunserious -- dismissal of phenomenology and Thomas Nagel's famous paper What Is It Like To Be A Bat?", keep watching to the 11:07 mark.

via 3 Quarks Daily.

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Teaching: History of American Atheism

I'm in the process of preparing a class on the history of American Atheism, which, as far as I can tell, is more or less uncharted territory. Existing studies and curricula seem to either be philosophical examinations of atheism (e.g.), or much too narrow for my interests (e.g.), or really more hagiographical canonization efforts than I am comfortable with (e.g.). Not to mention the very common whig histories of atheism.

Given the new(ish?) direction of the class I'm designing, it seems some readers might be interested in the shape of the class as it develops. Also, as there's no standard text outlining major figures or movements in American Atheism, I would appreciate readers' help in identifying critical people and/or texts to teach.

Below, I've listed those I have in mind who are important in this history and who I think can be taught fairly well to first and second year students with an interest in religious history and American cultural studies. I've construed "atheist" fairly broadly, to include some agnostics and skeptics (especially if they expand the possibility of disbelief); as well as some who's opposition to specific faith traditions is clear while their own position is more ambiguous; those of the political right as well as the more well-represented left; some who are hostile towards religion and some who attempt to make use of religious rhetoric. I've also tried to work in a fair representation of non-whites, women, and, as far as possible, some from backgrounds other than Protestant.

Are there any significant figures or movements I'm missing?

Anyone who would likely teach particularly well that I haven't thought of?

Course description:

From Cotton Mather’s denunciations to Daniel Dennett’s proposal atheists rebrand themselves as “brights,” atheists have been a much-discussed but little understood feature of the religious landscape of America. This class will take a historical approach to the subject, analytically examining the many varieties of atheism in America. Students will learn about atheisms, plural, in the past and present, and will study their cultural contexts, as well as arguments for and against the existence of God, and vying conceptions of meaning and morality. Students will also be introduced to the methodological issues in the study of the history of religion, gaining a working understanding of the approaches entailed by cultural history.

Tentative syllabus:
1. Thomas Paine
2. Joel Barlow
3. Joseph Weydemeyer
4. Robert Ingersoll
5. Charles Chilton Moore and the Blue Grass Blade
6. Emma Goldman
7. Eugene V. Debs
8. Emanuel and Marcet Haldeman-Julius
9. Richard Wright
10. James Baldwin
11. Ayn Rand
12. Madeline Murray O'Hare
13. Kurt Vonnegut
14. Thomas Altizer
15. Sam Harris
16. David Silverman
17. YouTub videos: "Why I am an Atheist"/"How I became an Atheist."
18. "Preachers who are not believers"
19. Chris Stedman

Update:
Additions suggested via twitter:
Felix Adler
Paul Kutz
Carl Sagan

Update:
Additions suggested via Facebook:
Penn Jilette
Seth MacFarlane
George Carlin
Linus Pauling
Richard Feynman
James Rani
Michael Hardt
H.L. Menken

Update:
Other additions suggested:
Charles Lee Smith
Ambrose Bierce
H.P. Lovecraft

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'We must disagree with those prophets of gloom'

"In the daily exercise of our pastoral office, we sometimes have to listen, much to our regret, to voices of persons who, though burning with zeal, are not endowed with too much sense of discretion or measure. In these modern times they can see nothing but prevarication and ruin. They say that our era, in comparison with past eras, is getting worse, and they behave as though they had learned nothing from history, which is, none the less, the teacher of life. They behave as though at the time of former Councils everything was a full triumph for the Christian idea and life and for proper religious liberty.

"We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand."

-- Pope John XXIII, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia (Mother Church Rejoices), the opening speech of the Second Vatican Council, which began 50 years ago today.  

Pope John XXIII opens the Second Vatican Council

Vatican II documents
Vatican II hymnal
Georgetown University conference: Fifty Years after Vatican II
Pope Benedict XVI remembers the council, fifty years later
Pope Benedict XVI (mis)remembers the council, fifty years later
American Catholics remembering and reflecting on Vatican II
A 1962 editorial in a Catholic magazine on the eve of the council: Can the Council Succeed?
Karl Rahner: Notes Towards a Theological Interpretation of Vatican II
BC Butler: The historical context of Vatican II
Giuseppet Alberigo: A Brief History of Vatican II
The History of Vatican II: The effects
Walter Kasper: The continuing challenges of the hermeneutics of Vatican II
Colleen McDannel: The Spirit of Vatican II
Vatican II is still in dispute
The council as "New-Modernist Rupture" 
Supplica, a document signed by 82 scholars calling for a review and reassessment of the council.

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