Martin Spence reports on an Oxford conference on religious humanisms, covering Islamic and African Christian perspectives, and says it led him to reconsider his view that humanism has a single historical meaning.
Dave Francis describes the Network’s work in religious education: the rise of the ‘nones’, the Solarity materials for clubs and schools, the Big Ideas for RE programme, and contributions to BBC Bitesize.
Second of three reflections on religious education in England: the Curriculum and Assessment Review of 2025 recommends RE join the National Curriculum, compatible with the ‘religion and worldviews’ and Big Ideas for RE approaches. Advantages, disadvantages and hopes are weighed.
Two reflections on Network publications: Teresa Wallace on editing This is My Story (1998) and Time and Tide (2001), and David Boulton on his books on religion as a human creation, including A Reasonable Faith (1996).
Survey of Sea of Faith Network publications from 1995 to the forthcoming A Philosophy of Life: The Spirituality of Don Cupitt (2027), with their editors and contributors. Profits from the new book support the Network’s educational work.
The books editor outlines changes to the books section: more short notices of useful books, reviews that raise questions to start conversations, and a list of eight recent titles.
Network Matters column on the Network’s educational charity purpose and Sofia’s aims. It reviews critiques of the World Religions Paradigm, lived religion, religious literacy and the Religion and Worldviews approach.
Editorial marking 125 years since the 1901 liberal religious congress in London. It discusses faith and reason through Aquinas’s ‘living faith’, links this to ethics-centred religion, and introduces the issue’s contents and the new editor’s plans.
Network members are asked to give one new SOFN leaflet to a person who might not know that religion can be explored without belief in the supernatural. A newer member describes his own route to the Network.
A brief notice of the death of Janet Seargeant, a long-standing Sea of Faith member and Steering Group member, remembered as kind and insightful and for her contribution to the life of the Network.