Barbara Burfoot, a retired humanist celebrant, reviews Emerging Ritual in Secular Societies, ed. Jeltje Gordon-Lennox, covering the origins of ritual, secular confirmations, weddings, funerals and spontaneous memorials.
Barbara Burfoot revisits Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, his reply to Burke defending the French Revolution, popular sovereignty, freedom of religion and a rudimentary welfare state.
Barbara Burfoot revisits Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason: his deist statement of faith, his view of churches as human inventions, and his moral critique of the Bible, still forceful despite its naivety.
Barbara Burfoot revisits Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, summarising its four parts on government, monarchy and American independence, and noting Paine’s use of scripture against monarchy and his donation of royalties to the Continental...
Review of Gerard Russell’s Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, a survey of religions surviving in the Middle East, including the Mandaeans, Yazidis, Zoroastrians, Druze, Samaritans, Copts and Kalasha, and the threats they face.
Barbara Burfoot recounts Thomas Paine’s life, from Thetford and the Excise to Common Sense, Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, and argues he was a deist and radical, not an atheist.
Barbara Burfoot reviews Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, which argues from statistics that violence has declined over history, with religion an ‘inner demon’ and human flourishing purpose enough.
Barbara Burfoot, a humanist celebrant, reviews Geoff Crocker’s An Enlightened Philosophy, which seeks a synthesis of metaphysics and myth for atheists. She notes its broad-brush history, its omission of humanist organisations, and its stress on...
Barbara Burfoot, a secular humanist and funeral officiant, gives a personal account of humanism and its organisations, and urges humanist members of Sea of Faith to promote religious literacy.
