Twenty Gods or None: Belief, Unbelief, and the Making of a Nation

From the very beginning, the United States was shaped by remarkable religious diversity. Examining this forgotten history through a controversy involving Thomas Jefferson's supposedly "atheistical" library, Peter Manseau will recount America's past from the perspective of believers and non-believers whose stories have gone untold. This event is hosted with support from the Yale Seminar in Religious Studies.

Peter Manseau is the author of the memoir Vows, the novel Songs for the Butcher's Daughter, the travelogue Rag and Bone, and the new retelling of American history One Nation, Under Gods. Winner of the National Jewish Book Award, the American Library Association's Sophie Brody Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Jewish Literature, the Ribalow Prize for Fiction, and a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, Manseau has also been shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize and the Prix Médicis étranger, awarded to the best foreign novel published in France. A founding editor of KillingTheBuddha.com and coauthor with Jeff Sharlet of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible, he received his doctorate in religion from Georgetown University, and is currently curating an exhibit on America's diverse religious past for the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

6 PM (doors open at 5:30)
RSV Room, Yale Divinity School
409 Prospect St, New Haven, CT
Free and open to the public

This event is a part of Yale and New Haven Humanism Week. Learn more at yalehumanists.com

This event is organized with support from the Yale Undergraduate Humanist Society and the None/Others at Yale Divinity School.

Praise for One Nation, Under Gods:

"Subversive and much-needed...[a] tour de force. A thorough reimagining of our nation's religions.... Engagingly written, with a historian's eye for detail and a novelist's sense of character and timing, this history from another perspective reexamines familiar tales and introduces fascinating counternarratives."―Starred Publishers Weekly review