I am sorry to tell you that this will be my last regular “Spirited Atheist” column, and I want to thank all of you who have followed my essays, including many who have taken the trouble to write me lengthy personal letters on my author Web site. Although I will continue to write occasionally on issues of unusual importance, a weekly column diverts too much time from the research for my next book, to be titled, “Conversions: A Secular History.”

In the new book, I will be examining the full range of historical and personal factors influencing ostensibly religious conversions, from that old favorite, the threat of execution, to marrying a third wife who happens to be a Catholic rather than a Protestant. For the former, see under: Judaism, Christianity and Islam; for the latter, under: Gingrich, Newt.

English-born author, 62, who had lived in Washington since 1982, was a master of the persuasive essay. (MARVIN JOSEPH - WASHINGTON POST) My old friend Julius Hobson, an unconventional Washington civil rights leader in the 1960s (he once drove a cage of rats to Georgetown and threatened to release them at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street so the power brokers would know how the other half lives), used to say, “I sleep mad.” When I mentioned this many years ago to Christopher Hitchens, who died of cancer Thursday, Christopher remarked, “What a great epitaph that would be!”

An Egyptian flag is placed next to the flag of the Freedom and Justice Party, founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, at the party headquarters in Cairo on November 30, 2011. (ODD ANDERSEN - AFP/GETTY IMAGES) Among the more disturbing news developments in recent weeks is the surprising (to some western pundits, at least) strength shown by the hardest line Islamic party in the first round of Egypt’s parliamentary elections. This story is being buried inside newspapers and at the bottom of newcasts, as the American media concentrate on truly important subjects such as the size of Professor Newt Gingrich’s head and former candidate Herman Cain’s strange exit from the presidential primary stage.

In this Friday, Nov. 25, 2011, photo, shoppers stop to look at a display while shopping at Dadeland Mall, in Miami. (Lynne Sladky - AP)

I’ve been thinking a lot about possessions lately, as the now-inevitable reports of violence inflicted by Black Friday shoppers on one another during the struggle for discounted Xboxes and television sets has coincided in my life with the depressing and exhausting task of cleaning out my mother’s apartment after her death at age 90.

Imagine that the year is 1932 and presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt, instead of addressing himself to the economic paralysis that has gripped the nation, talks endlessly about the polio-induced paralysis of his own legs as some sort of unique qualification for the presidency. He blathers on about his deep faith in God as the reason he should be elected, weeps at the memory not only of his struggle with polio but of his own sins, and generally talks to the Americans as if they were choosing a Confessor/Penitent-in-Chief instead of a president.