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The Good Book: A Humanist Bible

with AC Grayling

April 11, 2011
1 hours 16 minutes
AC Grayling

 

AC Grayling spoke about his book, The Good Book, at Warwick's bookstore in La Jolla, CA. From their announcement:

Critically acclaimed author and professor of philosophy, A.C. Grayling will be at Warwick's on Monday, April 11th at 7:30pm to discuss and sign his new book, The Good Book: A Humanist Bible.

Published on the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible, a book of extraordinary audacity from a remarkable thinker - a secular humanist Bible drawn from the wisdom and inspiration in the world's great literature. Few, if any, thinkers and writers today would have the imagination, the breadth of knowledge, and the literary skill to conceive of a powerful, secular alternative to the Bible. But that is exactly what A. C. Grayling has done, creating a nonreligious Bible drawn from the wealth of secular literature and philosophy in both Western and Eastern traditions, using the same techniques of editing, redaction, and adaptation that produced the holy books of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions.

The Good Book consciously takes its design and presentation from the Bible, in the beauty of its language and its arrangement into short chapters and verses, offering to the nonreligious seeker all the wisdom, insight, solace, inspiration, and perspective of various secular humanist traditions. Organized in twelve main sections - Genesis, Histories, Wisdom, The Sages, Parables, Consolations, Lamentations, Proverbs, Songs, Epistles, Acts, and The Good Book opens with meditations on the origin and progress of the world and human life in it, then devotes attention to the question of how life should be lived, how we relate to one another, and how vicissitudes are to be faced and joys appreciated. Inspired by the work of Herodotus and Lucretius, Confucius and Mencius, Seneca and Cicero, Montaigne, Bacon, and so many others, The Good Book is a publishing event and a literary tour de force.

For more of AC Grayling and his discussions on TSN over the years, click here.

AC Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birbeck College, University of London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited many books on philosophy and other subjects; among his most recent are a biography of William Hazlitt and a collection of essays. For several years he wrote the "Last Word" column for the Guardian and is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Review and the Financial Times.

Books by AC Grayling:

The Good Book: A Humanist Bible Meditations for the Humanist: Ethics for a Secular Age Ideas That Matter: The Concepts That Shape the 21st Century