Exploring the journey of a former Evangelical Christian who embraces his identity as a gay atheist, the narrative delves into his efforts to foster understanding between atheists and the religious. Through personal experiences and insights, the protagonist challenges stereotypes, promotes dialogue, and seeks common ground, highlighting themes of acceptance, faith, and the complexities of belief in a diverse society.
The stunning popularity of the "New Atheist" movement--whose most famous spokesmen include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens--speaks to both the growing ranks of atheists as well as their vehement disdain for religion. In Faitheist, Chris Stedman challenges the orthodoxies of this movement and makes a passionate argument that atheists should learn to respect religious identity while remaining secular. Stedman draws on his work organizing interfaith and secular communities, his academic study of religion, and his experiences as a former born-again Christian who struggled with his homosexuality and became, for a time, a New Atheist--until he saw its shortcomings. As someone who has stood on both sides of the divide, Stedman is uniquely positioned to present a way for atheists and the religious to find common ground.
What does IRL really mean in the digital age? Every day, the lines between digital and real space blur even further. A must-read (Buzzfeed Books), IRL invites us to consider how the online spaces we use might fulfill our essential human need to feel real.
What Does ""IRL (In Real Life)"" Really Mean in Today's Digital Age? It's easy and reflexive to view our online presence as fake, to see the internet as a space we enter when we aren't living our real, offline lives. Yet so much of who we are and what we do now happens online, making it hard to know which parts of our lives are real. IRL, Chris Stedman's personal and searing exploration of authenticity in the digital age, shines a light on how age-old notions of realness--who we are and where we fit in the world--can be freshly understood in our increasingly online lives. Stedman offers a different way of seeing the supposed split between our online and offline selves: the internet and social media are new tools for understanding and expressing ourselves, and the not-always-graceful ways we use these tools can reveal new insights into far older human behaviors and desires. IRL invites readers to consider how we use the internet to fulfill the essential human need to feel real--a need many of us once met in institutions, but now seek to do on our own, online--as well as the ways we edit or curate ourselves for digital audiences. The digital search for meaning and belonging presents challenges, Stedman suggests, but also myriad opportunities to become more fully human. In the end, he makes a bold case for embracing realness in all of its uncertainty, online and off, even when it feels risky.
