The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

Description

A biography that restores America’s foremost nineteenth-century champion of reason and secularism to our still contested twenty-first-century public squareAn easy to read and engaging biography of this not well-known American hero of liberty, science, human rights, and irreligion. The story of his life is woven into the examination of his liberal progressive positions on social issue of his day, which seem to be many of the issue we are debating still. The short, concise book is a good introduction to Ingersoll if you know little of him and is also interesting to Ingersoll-philes by organizing the chapters thematically around the causes and issues he advocated. So, rather than a strictly chronological read, Jacoby dives, one by one, into the major topics of his many speeches, and interviews: Science, including Darwin’s Theory of Evolution; separation of church and state; free speech, especially blasphemy; women’s rights and equality; Humanism and Freethinking; and his criticism of the Bible, church, and preachers. The value of a new, modern biography is that it can show us how relevant the work of its subject can still be to us today. With references to recent current events, people and debates, she illustrates how Ingersoll’s words and arguments are still relevant. She closes with a chapter addressed to the so called `new atheists’ advising that they should be learning from Ingersoll and giving him credit for having advanced the conversation challenging religion over 120 years ago. Highly recommended. If you have never heard of Ingersoll, you will ask yourself, “Why haven’t I ever heard of this man before?”