Burgess Laughlin

Burgess Laughlin's central purpose in life is to tell success stories from history. He is not an academic scholar, but primarily a storyteller who writes to inform and inspire advocates of a culture based on reason.

He received a BA in cultural history from Tulane University in 1967. He worked as a writer, editor, and publications manager in the electronics industry, before retiring in 1989.

In 1995, he published _The Aristotle Adventure: A Guide to the Greek, Arabic, and Latin Scholars Who Transmitted Aristotle's Logic to the Renaissance_. It is a clearly written intellectual adventure for general readers intrigued by the history of fundamentally important ideas.

From 1996 to 2000, he studied history and languages at Portland State University (Oregon), as a post-baccalaureate student. He became a member of the Phi Alpha Theta History Honors Society. His classroom studies and six years of subsequent research led to the August 2010 publication of _The Power and the Glory: The Key Ideas and Crusading Lives of Eight Debaters of Reason vs. Faith_.

His weblog, "The Main Event," at http://reasonversusmysticism.blogspot.com , is a journal for his next book, on the crucial conflict of our time -- the war between reason and mysticism.