Godwin (4th Estate) by Joseph O’Neill. Joseph O’Neill remains best known for Netherland (2008). Hailed as a Great American ...

Most scientific breakthroughs take years of research – but often, serendipity provides the final push, as these historic discoveries show .

The great Buddha statue in Nha Trang, Vietnam by Petr Ruzicka On paper, Buddhism looks pretty good. It has a philosophical subtlety married to a stated devotion to tolerance that makes it stand out ...

Technology is enabling us to retreat from the outside world. But we should resist the urge – for ourselves and for each other Patrons outside a busy pub in the Yorkshire Dales. Credit: Alamy There ...

The British ethical societies, forerunners of Humanists UK, emerged in the 1880s. As the London Ethical Society put it in its first report in 1887, they offered a basis for “well-doing and well-being” ...

“The Crucifixion” (c. 1340) by Paolo Veneziano. Credit: Alamy Heresy: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God (Picador) by Catherine Nixey Many of us suffer from the cognitive bias known as the “just ...

Historian Jonathan Israel's magisterial three-volume history of the 'Radical Enlightenment' is the intellectual version of a JCB, ripping up the terrain around him. Kenan Malik follows him down the ...

This article appears in the Witness section of the Summer 2019 issue of the New Humanist. Subscribe today. In April, the world watched as flames consumed Notre Dame, the 850-year-old cathedral in ...

This article is a preview from the Spring 2016 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here. After 80 years the Loch Ness monster lingers on, mostly as a gift to cartoonists and ...

Credit: James Eades via Unsplash Bothy: In Search of Simple Shelter (William Collins) by Kat Hill In the summer of 1847, Oxford academic Arthur Hugh Clough, in a slump, travelled north to the Scottish ...

The authors view the period of 1930-70 as the first “gilded age” of humanism. Books like The Humanist Outlook (1968), edited by the philosopher A. J. Ayer, helped to define humanism in terms of ...

Image by Martin Rowson. This article is a preview from the Summer 2015 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here. If you could dig a tunnel right through the Earth you could ...