Janet Heimlich is the founder of the Child-Friendly Faith Project and author of Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment, both of which examine child abuse and neglect that is enabled by religious belief in the United States.

Janet is also a reporter who has worked for NPR and written for a variety of publications.

(Full disclosure, I’m on the advisory board for the Child-Friendly Faith Project.)

I spoke with her about the way children suffer at the hands of religion, whether teaching kids about Hell constitutes abuse, and what atheists can do to help.

Dr. Leigh Eric Schmidt is the Edward C. Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He joined the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics in 2011. He previously taught at Harvard and Princeton. He has appeared in and on all kinds of media to talk about his work and he’s the author of several books. His latest is Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation.

We spoke with Leigh about whether we were ever a “Christian nation,” why the “New Atheists” really aren’t new at all, what we can learn from a cartoonist who lived a century ago.

In another life, Frank Schaeffer would probably be an evangelical leader and someone with a powerful position in conservative politics. His father was the influential Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer and Frank himself, along with his father, helped create the modern Religious Right.

Frank is the author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back and, more recently, Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in God.

We spoke about his role in creating the Religious Right, why evangelicals are flocking to Donald Trump when he shares almost none of their values, and what he would say to anyone who might vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein.

Notes:

Frank was the subject of a New York Times profile and also did a powerful interview with Rachel Maddow

You can see the documentary Let Me Be FRANK right here.

Dr. Karen Garst is the former executive director of the Oregon Community College Association and Oregon State Bar. She writes at the website Faithless Feminist, and she’s the editor of a new book called Women Beyond Belief: Discovering Life Without Religion.

We spoke about how women are uniquely affected in a negative way by religion, what’s stopping more women from leaving their faith, and why we don’t see more women celebrated as atheists.