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Lesley Hazleton    

Author of "The First Muslim," a New Look at the Life of Muhammad

Lesley Hazleton is a British-American author whose work focuses on the intersection and interactions between politics and religion. Hazleton has reported from Jerusalem for Time, and has written on the Middle East for numerous publications including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Nation, and The New Republic. Hazleton has traced the roots of conflict in several books, including compelling 'flesh-and-blood' biographies of Muhammad and Mary, and casts an agnostic eye on politics, religion, and existence on her blog, AccidentalTheologist.com.

Her popular book, "Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto," celebrates the agnostic stance as rising above the flat two-dimensional line of belief and unbelief, creating new possibilities for how we think about being in the world. In it, she explores what we mean by the search for meaning, invokes the humbling perspective of infinity and reconsiders what we talk about when we talk about soul.

Speech Topics


The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

News


Beautiful Sentences Can't Save Lesley Hazleton's Agnostic from Its Moral and Logical Flaws
Their slow and steady cadences comfort me, and they reflect the extremely balanced-seeming mind that creates them. Take this one, for instance: "Blessedly unencumbered by either the need to believe or the need to explain everything, the agnostic is free to experience awe without seeking to define it—to explore and interact with the world in ways that neither the rule-bound fundamentalist nor the dogmatic atheist ever dares dream of."
Religion and the position of having no position
Author Lesley Hazleton gives good attention to the religious position of having no position, if I can put it that way. In Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, she argues in favor of agnosticism.

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