Sam Harris took to his Twitter to announce his forthcoming book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, scheduled to hit the bookshelves in October. Jerry Coyne has tracked down a description:

Harris proposes that answers to questions of human value can be visualized on a “moral landscape”—a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks and valleys correspond to states of greater or lesser well being in conscious creatures like ourselves. Different ways of thinking and behaving—different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc.—translate into movements across this landscape. Such changes can be analyzed objectively on many levels—ranging from biochemistry to economics—but they have their crucial realization as states and capacities of the human brain.

Journalist Ian Monroe has created a new version of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species with all the words that do not appear in the King James Bible (33,000 of them) blacked out. The purpose, he explains in a statement:

I wanted people to reflect on the nature of language, and particularly on fundamentalism, and the notion of ‘the Bible said it, I believe it, that settles it,’ which seems to preclude most concepts in a modern worldview. I also thought it would be pretty funny to actually see what it would look like if you could visually remove all those modern concepts.

On his blog The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan writes:

Since our online dialogue a couple of years ago, Sam and I have become good friends, and we are planning to turn our conversation into a little print on demand book, with some contributions from other atheists and believers. If you’d like to get on an email list so that when we manage to put this all together, we can notify you and tell you how you can get a copy—for your own or, we hope, teaching use or a basis for discussion groups—send an email to samandandrewdialogue@gmail.com. I’m a bit swamped right now but we hope to get this done soon.
We are going to donate all proceeds to St Jude’s Children Research Center.
This is about trying to restore a civil conversation between serious people of faith and sincere non-believers, to try and defuse and depolarize this debate some more.

Our friend Barbara King, an anthropologist at The College of William & Mary, has just published her newest book, Being With Animals, looking at the complex and deep connection we have with the animal kingdom. King traces the evolutionary and spiritual history of the way we relate to animals—expressed through cave art and hunting, domestication (described as a process of mutual engagement), and various religious traditions—and shares some of her own personal history with monkeys, apes, and cats.
As she sums up the book:

The idea is WHY are we so obsessed with animals, HOW did that come about in evolutionary and religious contexts, and WHAT does it all mean for the ethics of our relating with animals?