Women in Secularism 4

Rafida Bonya Ahmed is a humanist activist, published author, and moderator at Mukto-Mona blog. She works as a senior director in the finance industry. She is the widow of Dr. Avijit Roy, who was a well-known writer, blogger, and activist who founded Mukto-Mona, the first online blog for Bengali-speaking freethinkers. Ms. Ahmed grew up in Bangladesh and later moved to Canada and the United States for higher education. Dr. Roy and Ms. Ahmed were brutally attacked by religious fundamentalists during a book-signing trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh, on February 26, 2015. Dr. Roy was hacked to death, and Ms. Ahmed was gravely injured during the attack. Since the attack, the same fundamentalist terrorist group has killed and injured other bloggers and writers. These gruesome attacks are meant to destroy the freethinking movement in Bangladesh. But the secular movement in Bangladesh and the Mukto-Mona community are more determined now than ever to secure free speech and keep Dr. Roy’s dream alive.

Robyn Blumner is CEO of the Center for Inquiry and president and CEO of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science. Previously she had a sixteen-year career as a nationally syndicated columnist and editorial writer at the Tampa Bay Times newspaper (formerly the St. Petersburg Times). In 2012, she was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing along with colleagues. Blumner was executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and executive director of the ACLU of Utah. Blumner attended Cornell University, School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Her law degree comes from New York University School of Law.

Melanie Brewster, assistant professor of psychology and education at Columbia University, earned her PhD from the University of Florida. Her research focuses on stigma and examines how experiences of dehumanization and discrimination may shape the mental health of people from marginalized groups (e.g., LGBTQ individuals, atheists and nonbelievers, people of color). Her first book, Atheists in America, was published in 2014 by Columbia University Press. She tweets about atheism, queer issues, and academia @melysebrewster.

Johnetta Elzie, @nettaaaaaaaa, 26, is a protester and organizer, born and raised in St. Louis, who became known for documenting the events of Ferguson on Twitter in August 2014. Since then, she has worked to organize toward sustainable change. She sits on the planning team for mappingpoliceviolence.org and wetheprotesters.org to provide police accountability and organizer resources. In August 2015, she helped launch Campaign Zero, a comprehensive policy platform to address police violence in the United States. Johnetta believes that Michael Brown and the uprising in Ferguson forever changed her life. Her writing, “The TSA Searched My Hair Because I’m a Black Woman with Braids—And It’s Not Okay,” has been featured by Teen Vogue. Her work as a youth activist has been profiled in Teen Vogue, New York Times Magazine, The LA Times, and O Magazine, among others. Essence featured Johnetta on the cover of its February 2016 Black Girl Magic issue. She has been awarded the Howard Zinn Freedom to Write Award with fellow activist DeRay McKesson for their creation of the #Ferguson Protestor Newsletter, and been named to Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers 2015.

Annie Laurie Gaylor is cofounder of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and, with Dan Barker, the current copresident. She is also editor of the organization's newspaper, Freethought Today. She is the author of several books, including Woe to the Women: The Bible Tells Me So, Betrayal of Trust: Clergy Abuse of Children, and Women Without Superstition: “No Gods—No Masters.” Gaylor and her mother, Anne Nicol Gaylor, with the late John Sontarck, founded the Freedom From Religion Foundation in a meeting around the Gaylors' dining room table in 1978. Gaylor also has been involved in feminist activism since she was fourteen and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Women’s Medical Fund, an abortion rights charity.

Debbie Goddard is the director of outreach at the Center for Inquiry and the director of African Americans for Humanism. Before working for CFI, she participated in local freethought groups in the greater Philadelphia region and helped organize and support campus groups internationally as a student volunteer. She has also been involved with progressive issues and LGBT activism. In June 2006, CFI hired Debbie as a field organizer, allowing her to utilize her grassroots organizing experience working with campus and community groups. In 2012, she was promoted to director of outreach and now oversees CFI’s U.S. branches and the international campus outreach initiative.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher who is also a novelist and public intellectual. She is the author of ten books, many of which cross the divide between fiction and nonfiction. Her latest book is Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, which won the Forkosch Award for best book in 2014 from the Council for Secular Humanism. She has won numerous awards for both her fiction and scholarship, including a MacArthur fellowship, popularly known as the “Genius Prize.” In 2011, she was named “Humanist of the Year” by the American Humanist Association and was also named “Free-thought Heroine” by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. In 2014, she received the Richard Dawkins Award from the Atheist Alliance of America. In September of 2015, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal, the highest award granted in the country for work in the humanities. The medal was presented by President Barack Obama in a White House ceremony. She is currently visiting professor of philosophy and English at NYU and also visiting professor of philosophy at the New College of the Humanities, London, England.

Sarah Haider is an American writer, speaker, and activist. Born in Pakistan and raised in Texas, Sarah spent her early youth as a practicing Shia Muslim. In her late teens, she began to read the Quran critically and left religion soon after. In 2013, she cofounded Ex-Muslims of North America, where she advocates for the acceptance of religious dissent and works to create local support communities for those who have left Islam. In addition to atheism, Sarah is particularly passionate about civil liberties and women’s rights.

Rebecca Hale, president of the American Humanist Association, has been a humanist her entire life. She was born in New York City to humanist parents, although they called themselves Unitarians. Throughout her upbringing and life, the focus has always been grounded on a life philosophy of personal responsibility. If there is something that needs doing, it is incumbent on each person to do what can be done toward the goal. This carries through on all aspects of life; from cleaning up after dinner to cleaning up the environment. She has raised two children with this philosophy; both (Joshua and Tanrei) are wonderful people and humanists.

The unexplained has always been that which science does not yet understand. After her due diligence, she has come to appreciate the value of laughter, beautiful music, friendship, a walk on the beach, and good nutrition. As the late great Albuquerque humanist, Harry Wilson, wrote in Freedom from God, there is this sense of wonder and awe, the “oceanic” feeling one gets when confronted with the magnificence of nature. She is among the millions who don’t accept a divine, all-seeing controller of the universe and thinks room needs to be made in humanism for those who are on that journey.

Rebecca followed her BA in cultural anthropology and environmental studies with an MPA (Master in Public Administration) (1976) and embarked on a career in government, real estate development, and college administration. In 1993, observing the unsavory effects of the rise of evangelical Christians in Colorado Springs, her and her husband, Gary, started the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs and subsequently their web-based business, EvolveFISH.com. In 1997, EvolveFISH* was asked to take over the Humanist Book store, by its founder Lew Dunlap. She’s been active in the humanist world since. EvolveFISH.com was sold in May of 2014.

Wendy Kaminer, a lawyer and social critic, writes about law, liberty, feminism, free speech, religion, criminal justice, and popular culture. A former Guggenheim fellow, she is the author of eight books, including Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety; I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement & Other Self-Help Fashions; and A Fearful Freedom: Women’s Flight from Equality. She is an advisor to the Secular Coalition for America and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Linda LaScola is coauthor, with Daniel C. Dennett, of Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind (2013) and Preachers Who Are Not Believers (2010). An independent qualitative research consultant since 1984, she is a cofounder of the Clergy Project and is editor of the Patheos blog Rational Doubt: With Voices from the Clergy Project.

Ashley F. Miller is a writer, activist, and communications scholar from South Carolina, who has worked for LGBT, secular, and women's rights for over a decade. She has written for dozens of publications, including Salon, Freethought Blogs, and the academic journal CrossCurrents and has run local communications campaigns for abortion rights groups, law firms, news websites, and secular organizations. She holds a PhD in mass communications from the University of South Carolina, where she focused on women and minorities in the media. Before returning to school for her PhD, she worked in film and television in Los Angeles. She has a master’s in film production from Florida State University and a bachelor’s degree from Emory University in film studies. She also dabbles in the arts, performing on her ukulele and creating coloring books.

Maryam Namazie is an activist and campaigner with a history of leadership in many organizations. She is the spokesperson for Fitnah—Movement for Women’s Liberation, Equal Rights Now, the One Law for All campaign against Sharia Law, and the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain. Namazie has spoken on and written numerous articles about women’s rights issues, free expression, Islamism, and secularism, including for her blog, Nothing is Sacred. She was named Atheist of the Year by Kazimierz Lyszczynski (2014), was awarded Journalist of the Year at the Dods Women in Public Life Awards (2013), and was selected as one of the top forty-five women of the year by Elle magazine Quebec (2007). In June 2012, The Islamic regime of Iran’s media outlets did an “exposé” on Maryam titled “Meet this anti-religion woman.”

Kavin Senapathy is the cofounder of international pro-science, pro-biotech movement March Against Myths and coauthor of The Fear Babe: Shattering Vani Hari’s Glass House, a book discussing popular food misconceptions and why they proliferate in the face of mountains of evidence against them. She has a passion for refuting misconceptions popular in the wild, wild Internet west, with topics including genomics, health, food, and biotechnology. A regular contributor to Forbes, Grounded Parents, Skepchick, and Genetic Literacy Project, Senapathy's work has also appeared in Gawker and Slate.

Janet D. Stemwedel is a professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at San Jose State University, which she joined in Fall 2002. She earned her BA (in chemistry and philosophy) from Wellesley College. Thinking that she wanted to be a chemist when she grew up, she earned a PhD in physical chemistry at Stanford University. Then, realizing that the questions that kept her up at night (such as how humans, with our limited sensory apparatus and our comfortable biases, can manage to build reasonably reliable knowledge about the world) were really philosophical questions, she went back to Stanford to get a PhD in philosophy, with a focus on the history and philosophy of science. Her research focuses on the places where scientific knowledge-building and ethics are intertwined. This encompasses not just practices within the scientific community that lead to better knowledge, but also the broader question of how scientists and nonscientists can do a better job sharing a world with each other. Since 2006, she has written about the ethics and philosophy of science for outlets including Forbes, Scientific American, and ScienceBlogs.com.

Julia Sweeney is a writer, actress, and director. She is most well known for having spent four years on Saturday Night Live, between the years 1990–1994. She played many characters including the popular recurring character “Pat.” When she left SNL, she created and starred in many one-person shows including God Said Ha! and Letting Go of God. Both of these monologues were filmed and played on HBO and Showtime. Julia has appeared in many TV shows includingFrasier and Sex and the City. She has also appeared in many films including Pulp Fiction and Stuart Little. She does many voice overs for animated film and television including The Goode Family and Monster’s University. She was a writing staff member of many shows including Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives. She wrote a memoir that was published by Simon and Schuster in 2013 entitled If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother.

Kayley Whalen is an activist who works at the intersections of racial justice, transgender and queer issues, immigration, humanism, disability advocacy, and drug policy reform. She is the Digital Strategies and Social Media Manager at the National LGBTQ Task Force. She is multi-racial Latina/white. She skated with the DC Rollergirls under the name “Lenore Gore” for five years, and her story, “Talk Derby To Me,” was published in the anthology Gender Outlaws the Next Generation. She is also an avid gamer and practices yoga. Kayley has a BA in English literature and a minor in women’s studies from Swarthmore College. You can follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/lenoregore.

Dr. Emily Willingham is a science writer, editor, and university instructor whose work has appeared online at the New York Times, Slate, Forbes, Discover, and NOVA, among others. Her book with co-author Tara Haelle, The Informed Parent (Perigee Books/Penguin), is now available, and she also is the author of The Complete IG to College Biology. Her writing focuses on health—especially mental health, neurobiology, and debunkery. She was the 2014 recipient of the John Maddox Prize for standing up for science, a joint initiative of Nature and the Kohn Foundation. Emily earned her bachelor’s degree in English and her PhD in biological sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in urology at the University of California, San Francisco, and spent some time on the tenure track, publishing thirty-plus papers along the way in the field of sex determination and development.

Become a secular celebrant!

As many as 20% of Americans are unaffiliated with any religion, yet our celebrations and ceremonies are dominated by religious leaders and officiants. CFI created our Secular Celebrant Program to address this problem by training secular people to officiate for nonreligious marriage and commitment ceremonies, funerals and memorials, and other celebrations of the milestones of life.

You can become a certified CFI Secular Celebrant by attending a special training session and meeting a few additional requirements. Secular Celebrant training is at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City on Thursday, September 22nd.

Read more about the Secular Celebrant program ›

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