Simply Secular: Essays for Happy Heretics

Chris Highland, a former minister and chaplain who is now a freethinking humanist, brings together an assortment of essays from the last twenty years as he emerged from ministry and non-profit work and on into teaching, lecturing and writing. From the Preface: "To be simply secular may not actually be simple at all. As James Baldwin states, freethinkers aren’t often welcomed—some don’t want us around. Yet, we keep standing up, speaking out, raising our voices. Those of us who live with the questions need to keep asking them, pushing, pulling, nudging—we’re educators as well as happy heretics, and though often not wanted, we’re needed.The essays in this book cover a lot of rough and rocky ground. The first chapter, “Beyond Spirituality,” sets the tone for tough wrestling with the major weaknesses of religion, specifically my original “homeroom”—Christianism. There are explorations into the wisdom of Steinbeck, Emerson, Lucretia Mott and others, as well as investigations into what a non-Christian Jesus may still offer the secular world. We consider why prayer can be an unhealthy distraction and the dream of heaven can be so destructive. We dig deeper into history, American exceptionalism, leadership and scholarship. Some essays are quite personal, especially the inter-related “Lessons My Father Taught Me” and “The Old Mailbox.”From the back cover: Bubbling from the mind of a freethinker, these essays are a cascade of questions for the faithful and fresh streams of thought for a common, secular future.Read more