Jonathan Israel

Students who will be first in their family to attend either a two- or four-year college or university and who are between the ages of 17 and 21 were asked to write on the topic, Why White Supremacy Goes Hand in Hand with Christian Nationalism, and we awarded a total of $17,650 this year.

And you can read these essays in our September issue of Free Thought Today, and you can get a complimentary copy by becoming a trial member at ffrf.org. Just click the Request Info link on our homepage or become a paid member, and your dues help make possible FFRF's major scholarship program for young people.

We also give out scholarships where they don't have to write an essay.

We're proud to announce that FFRF has also awarded $30,000 through our 2026 First in the Family Humanist Forward Free Thought Scholarship to six first-generation college students.

This is thanks to the generosity of the late FFRF benefactor, Lance Bredvold, who set up FFRF's forward freethought tuition scholarships.

Lance died late last year, but his generosity lives on.

We're pleased to work with Black Skeptics Los Angeles, BSLA, an African-American humanist atheist organization, which did the hard work of selecting the very deserving students.

And Dan, I might point out, yes, they do write a very short essay, but not in our context.

And yet we keep beating our head against, you know, thinking about it.

And so if you think about even, you know, like Steven Pinker, you know, writing about his defense of the Enlightenment or even, you know, Jonathan Israel and this massive tome about, you know, the nature of the Enlightenment or whatever.

I, I read those, those books and I'm like, "Yay," you know, like that.

[laughs]

Bertrand Russell later viewed the era as a reaction against religious authority rooted in earlier Protestant traditions.

Jonathan Israel suggests that the movement was driven by revolutionary ideas that emerged around 1650, challenging the core of faith and tradition.

While scholars have not agreed on a single definition, the liberation of the human mind remains a central theme in the study of this period across Western civilization.

Timespan.