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.”

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!”

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.

The underwhelming news of the week is Saudi Arabia’s 87-year-old King Abdullah’s decree that Saudi women be granted the right to vote, apparently in the year 2015. This development, a piece of largesse from the absolute monarch of an oil-rich Islamic theocracy, is actually being hailed by some in the West as a great example of progress for women in the Islamic world in the wake of the “Arab spring.”

This week’s “On Faith” question about the appropriateness of secular studies programs in universities is only tangentially related in the United States to the more fundamental and important civic issue of why Americans are so ignorant of the secular side of their own nation’s history. I am less concerned about whether the American public is unacquainted with secular philosophy than I am about its vast ignorance of the founders’ determination not to establish a Christian government. College courses cannot fill the empty space left by public elementary and secondary schooling in which secularism is considered a dirty word instead of an honorable part of American history.