The website of John C. Snider
Many readers will know that the late, great public intellectual Christopher Hitchens was celebrated as one of the Four Horsemen, a quartet of brilliant atheist writers, debaters, and orators that included Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett. When Hitchens died in 2011, many wondered who might step in to continue the fight against …
Several weeks ago, I recorded an interview for a podcast called The Divide. It’s co-hosted by Drew (a Christian turned skeptic) and Bill (a skeptic turned Christian). Here, we talk about my journey from faith to atheism, my experience as a secular officiant of weddings and funerals, and more!
Armageddon Time (2022) – I can’t validate the numerous comparisons that have been made with Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (not yet having seen the latter), but I can recommend this story of a family of New York Jews at the dawn of the Reagan era, which features themes of racism and classism, and a strange …
Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape (2016) – An alternatively exuberant and depressing documentary about the history of the cassette tape (invented in 1963) and its democratizing effect on music culture. Includes interviews with celebs like Henry Rollins, enthusiastic collectors, and the near-monosyllabic Dutch inventor who acts like he’d rather talk about anything else. Little Children (2006) …
Jim Geraghty (senior political correspondent for National Review) has a guest column today in The Washington Post Opinion section titled “How did politics get so awful?? I blame MTV circa 1992,” in which he lays the blame for today’s political dysfunction in America at the feet of MTV’s “Rock the Vote” campaign, which used celebrities, humor, and sex …
The year 2022 was filled with major events, any one of which would mark it as significant. The Russian invasion of Ukraine. The death of Queen Elizabeth II. The Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. The expected Republican tsunami that ended up more or less a draw. Former president Donald Trump’s ongoing legal troubles (including …
Remember when presidential candidate John McCain was confronted at a townhall by a half-addled little old lady who (mistakenly) lamented that McCain’s opponent, Barack Obama, was “a Muslim”? He immediately, firmly, but kindly, corrected her, emphasizing that Obama was a good man with whom he simply disagreed. Weeks later, McCain was visibly shaken by the …
Quick! Name a working astronaut. Chances are, unless you’re a keen space program enthusiast, that you can’t. But there was a time—Cold War America in the 1960s—when most schoolchildren could readily rattle off the names of Alan Shephard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Shirra, Gordon Cooper, and Deke Slayton: the Mercury Seven, the …
Ecclesiastes tells us that “there is nothing new under the sun,” and this certainly holds true when it comes to Christian apologetics. Apparently, it is also true that nothing is lost in translation if the apologetics originates from outside the Anglosphere. Case in point: Guillaume Bignon’s memoir Confessions of a French Atheist: How God Hijacked My …
It’s hard to impress upon fans born in the twenty-first century just what deserts television networks and movie theaters were for science fiction in the twentieth century. This is not to say those media were devoid of sci-fi, but with only three networks and five major studios, fans were lucky if there were more than …