Atheist Identities - Spaces and Social Contexts

Introduction, S. Tomlins and L. G. Beaman.- The Church on the Margins: The Religious Context of the New Atheism, W. A. Stahl.- Freedom of and Freedom from Religion: Atheist Involvement in Legal Cases, L.G. Beaman.- Atheism vs. Humanism: Ideological Tensions and Identity Dynamics, S. LeDrew.- The Cultural, the Nominal, and the Secular: The Social Reality of Religious Identity among Sri Lankan Tamil Youth in Canada, Amarasingam.- Secularist Rituals in the US: Solidarity and Legitimization, R. Cimino, C. Smith.- Believing to Belong: Non-religious Belief as a Path to Inclusion, S.C. Bullivant.- A Common Godlessness:  A Snapshot of a Canadian University Atheist Club, Why its Members Joined, and What that Community Means to Them, S. Tomlins.- From Atheist to Spiritual but not Religious: A Punctuated Continuum of Identities among the Second Generation of post-1970 Immigrants in Canada, P. Beyer.- Living Non-religious Identity in London, L. Mumford.- Without God yet not Without Nuance:A Qualitative Study of Atheism and Non-religion among Scottish University Students, C.R. Cotter.- Who Are the "New Atheists"? R.T. Cragun.

Lori G. Beaman, Ph.D. is the Canada Research Chair in the Contextualization of Religion in a Diverse Canada and Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is principal investigator of a 37 member international research team whose focus is religion and diversity (religionanddiversity.ca). Steven Tomlins is a PhD Candidate at the University of Ottawa in Religious Studies under the supervision of Lori G. Beaman, PhD. His current area of study deals with issues pertaining to identity within atheist organizations in a religiously diverse Canada. For his Masters he undertook a discourse analysis of 'New Atheist' literature and was awarded the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Dean's Scholarship. His Bachelor of Arts was obtained at the University of Prince Edward Island, where he majored in Religious Studies and double minored in Art History and Political Studies, receiving the Ambrose Lee Graduation Prize for graduating with the highest average in the fourth year of the Bachelor of Arts program. He is regularly employed as a teaching assistant, has given numerous guest lectures and conference presentations, and is a Student Team Member of The Religion and Diversity Project, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI). Outside of academia Steven has an interest in created writing; he has had several poems and works of short prose published, and he has won a Lucy Maud Montgomery Literature for Children Award and an Honorable Mention Milton Acorn Poetry Award.

"The purpose of Atheist Identities to explore how people construct atheist or nonreligious identities, and how these relate to their societal and institutional interactions. Its intended audiences are scholars and the public who are interested in the varieties of 'North Atlantic' atheist experiences and how they are shaped or expressed in 'local, national, and international settings' ... ." (Benjamin B. Devan, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 55 (2), 2016)