Austin Dacey—Friday, April 25—7:00 pm The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life (Prometheus Books, 2008) at the Center For Inquiry, Indiana.

Austin serves as a representative to the United Nations for the Center for Inquiry. He is also on the editorial staff of Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry magazines. His writings have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times.  In 2002 Austin earned a doctorate in philosophy. He lives in New York City.

 Featured Book and Book Tour:
The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life

Who holds the monopoly on morality?  Cultural conservatives from the Vatican to Washington tell us that ethics presupposes religion, and so religion belongs in public life.  Secular liberals counter that conscience is a private matter, a personal choice free from shared standards of truth or right.  Conservatives charge that conscience without standards is relativism.  Liberals didn’t lose their moral compass—they gave it away.

In his incisive new book, The Secular Conscience (Prometheus Books, March 2008), philosopher Austin Dacey breaks this ideological deadlock by boldly rethinking the nature of conscience and its role in public life.  Inspired by an earlier tradition he traces to Spinoza and John Stuart Mill, Dacey urges secular liberals to reclaim the language of objective values.

Dacey seeks nothing less than to interrupt a suicide, and he has written a beautiful primer on how our secular tradition can be rescued from self-defeat.  The Secular Conscience reveals how simplistic notions of privacy, tolerance, and freedom keep dangerous ideas sheltered from public debate. This is an extraordinarily useful and lucid book.
    – Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation