New This Month: Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

Raising Freethinkers (AMACOM) by Dale McGowan, Amanda Metskas, Molleen Matsumara and Jan Devor is a newly revised edition of a popular 2007 book. It was published in a hailstorm of controversy. The very premise of the book invites it. As the authors say in the preface to the new edition:

The sound you heard upon opening this book was the other shoe dropping. Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief is just that -- a practical guide. You’ll find ideas and ponderings in these pages, but also specific answers to common questions and hundreds of activities and resources to make those ideas come alive.

Now, clearly, Raising Freethinkers is not a book for everyone. At all. However, those faced with raising children outside of organized religion and looking for answers on how to proceed will find them here. McGowan writes:

Even though we can and often do end up pursuing the same ends, religious and nonreligious parenting really aren’t the same. There is a profound difference in the context, the space in which religious parenting and nonreligious parenting happen.

A really active and simple example of this comes from one brief line in the book: “Skepticism -- the simple request for reasoning or evidence before accepting a proposition -- is a virtue to treasure and cultivate in our kids.”

Questions of community, ethics, religious literacy “without indoctrination” and other important matters are considered and discussed. Raising Freethinkers is dynamic, thought-provoking reading for anyone, but non-religious parents will discover they no longer need to feel quite so alone.