Katherine Ozment is the author of Grace Without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging in a Secular Age. She has worked for National Geographic and Boston magazine and been published in the New York Times. She lives in Chicago with her husband and three children.

For years now, she has been exploring how the ever-growing segment of non-religious parents raise their children. They’re not all atheists, but they have to grapple with the Big Questions about life and death and belonging, all without supernatural faith. She wrote a magazine article about it a few years ago, and she has now written a full-length examination into the topic.

I spoke with her about what secular “grace” looks like, why atheists may want rituals traditionally reserved for the religious, and how the landscape for atheist parents is rapidly changing.

Julia Sweeney may be best known for her years on Saturday Night Live, where she famously played the androgynous character Pat. But she has since written multiple one-woman shows and books which speak to her experiences as a cancer survivor (God Said, Ha!), atheist (Letting Go of God), and mother (If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother).

Speaking of which, if you haven’t heard Letting Go of God yet, stop what you’re doing and go listen to it. It’s an incredible, funny story of how Julia shed her Catholicism. (A condensed version of the show was featured on a 2005 episode of This American Life.)

At the recent American Humanist Association conference in Chicago, we spoke with Julia and her daughter Mulan about how the character Pat would go over today, the movie Mulan finally watched for the very first time, and what Julia thinks about the new all-female Ghostbusters reboot.

Dr. Elizabeth Drescher is a professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University and the author, most recently, of Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of America’s Nones.

We spoke with her about what atheist “spirituality” really means, the problem with the language we use to talk about faith, and how religion is no longer being passed down generation after generation.

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Notes:

We mentioned the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study, which you can read right here.

At the American Humanist Association conference in Chicago recently, we had a chance to speak with a number of incredible people and we’ll be posting those interviews over the next few weeks.

Today, we’re posting our conversation with Margaret Downey, a life-long atheist activist and member of the Reason Rally Coalition Board of Directors. She is also founder and President of the Freethought Society and a former President of Atheist Alliance International.

We spoke with her about what to expect at this weekend’s Rally, how she plans to gauge its success, and what she wants people to take away from the event.