Introducing Denyse O'Leary

Hi, I'm Denyse O'Leary, a Toronto-based freelance journalist whose main beat is science questions that interest Christians or other theists or people who believe there is meaning and purpose in the universe. My most recent published book is By Design or by Chance?, an overview of the intelligent design controversy.

As this is my first post, I thought I'd just mention that in the middle of last night, I somehow became involved in a controversy about whether a leading atheist author really exists. You might enjoy reading about it here and here.

My other blogs are the Post-Darwinist, detailing events of interest in the intelligent design controversy (including that one), and the Mindful Hack, where I have posted a fair amount of inflammatory material on the question of whether there is a human mind, independent from the functions of the human brain. My lead author on the upcoming book - neuroscientist Mario Beauregard - and I think that there is, and that there is good evidence for it - and we defend our position in that book shortly to be published by Harper (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, The Spiritual Brain, San Francisco: Harper, 2007). I have been a busy little bee this last eighteen months as a result. You can get the sense of the kind of thing we talk about at The Mindful Hack.

Here's one topic I wanted to propose that writers might like to think about: Recently, I have been asked to do a lot of blogging for free - not by colleague groups like this one, I am NOT talking about this. I mean blogging instead of writing. The group normally pays me to
write but won't pay me to blog. They say they don't have the "budget" for it. Now, as the world leans more and more toward the blogosphere, that seems to me to be just a way of getting free work out of people they used to have to pay. I wonder if others would comment on that.