“Not only does religion offer us an immateriality allegedly shared by God and his heavenly hosts, it also offers us cosmic mattering, and it doesn’t get any bigger than that."
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist. She has written ten books, including Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away (Pantheon, 2014). She has won numerous awards for her fiction and scholarship, including a MacArthur fellowship. In 2015, she received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. Goldstein is a laureate of the International Academy of Humanism, a project of the Council for Secular Humanism, and an Honorary Director of the Center for Inquiry.
My engagement in both the tough world of professional philosophy and the even-tougher world of literary fiction has afforded me an ideal vantage point for viewing the many subtle ways in which gender biases undermine women.