Your book report is due!!!

Let's read and discuss Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism by Susan Jacoby

DON'T WORRY IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BOOK YET! WE STILL VALUE YOUR OPINION.

In this study of America and the history of ideas, journalist Susan Jacoby considers the creative tension between religionists and freethinkers (or secularists) throughout American history--beginning with the earliest debates about the kind of government that the new nation would have through many eras of reform and change. She considers the religious affiliations of great figures--such as Jefferson and Lincoln--and tells how both groups played a role in progressive movements, often working together. She argues that it was most often freethinkers who moved the country forward while at the same time maintaining steadfast to the ideals of liberty, freedom, and the separation of church and state.

Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004), was hailed in The New York Times as an "ardent and insightful work" that "seeks to rescue a proud tradition from the indifference of posterity."

Named a notable nonfiction book of 2004 by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, Freethinkers was cited in England as one of the outstanding international books of the year by the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian.

The author's previous books, include Moscow Conversations (1972), based on her experiences in Moscow from 1969 to 1971. Among her other books are Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge (Harper & Row), a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1984, and Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past (Scribner, 2000).

Jacoby has been a contributor for more than 25 years, on topics including law, religion, medicine, aging, women's rights, political dissent in the Soviet Union, and Russian literature, to a wide range of periodicals and newspapers. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Book World, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Newsday, Harper's, The Nation, Vogue, The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and the AARP Magazine, among other publications. They have been reprinted in numerous anthologies of columns and magazine articles.

She is also program director of the Center for Inquiry-New York City, a rationalist think tank and a regular panelist for On Faith, a Web site sponsored by The Washington Post and Newsweek.

She also has her own political blog, The Secularist's Corner on the Web site of The Washington Post.

Susan Jacoby has been the recipient of many grants and awards, from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Ford Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2001-2002, she was named a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.