Us v Them: The State of the Divide Between Believers and Secularists, 2004 and Beyond

October 23-24, 2004 NYC
NYU School of Law
40 Washington Square South (corner of MacDougall Street)
Tishman Auditorium

During the weekend of October 22nd through October 24th, the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU convened a major conference on the current state of the Religious/Secular Divide, just days before the American Presidential election in which that divide may have played a prominent role. The conference took place in the Tishman Auditorium of the NYU Law School and was open to the public, with admission free on a first-come first-served basis.

Featured panelists included playwright Tony Kushner, biologist Richard Dawkins, pledge-of-allegiance litigator Michael Newdow, Muslim feminist Irshad Manji, the head of the Open Society Institute Aryeh Neier (who prior to that headed both the ACLU and Human Rights Watch), philosophers Anthony Appiah and Akeel Bilgrami, Jack Miles (the author of "God: A Biography"), James Carroll (the Boston Globe columnist and author of "Constantine's Sword"), Jennifer Hecht (author of "Doubt: A History"),Susan Jacoby (author of "Freethinkers"), the celebrated Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, and many others.