RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n
RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n
JANUARY & FEBRUARY 2012 VOLUME 127 No 1
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RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n
RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n
RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n
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CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE
MYRA ZEPF writes children’s fiction and is a regular columnist for the Gaelic-language An tUltach magazine. On page 11 she explains why her New Year’s resolution is to stop answering her children’s questions. She lives in County Down, Northen Ireland.
FREDERIK STJERNFELT is Professor of Semiotics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He says the response of the AngloAmerican press to the fireboming of the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has been cowardly (see page 9).
4 New Humanist JANUARY FEBRUARY 2012
ABBY OHLHEISER is a freelance journalist and a regular contributor to the online review of religious news The Revealer (therevealer. org). She lives in Brooklyn, New York. On page 14 she reviews the Republican candidates vying for the “God ’n’ Guns” vote.
CULLEN MURPHY is editor at large of Vanity Fair magazine. His new book, God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World, will be published by Penguin in January. On page 33 he reveals what he discovered in the Inquisition archives.
JAMILA BEY is a journalist living in Washington, DC. Born to a Southern Baptist convert to Catholicism and a non-practising Black Muslim, she is now an out and proud atheist, not an easy thing for a African-American woman to be, as she describes on page 32.
atheist, not an easy thing o