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.
Paul Overend compares Nygren’s agape versus eros, C.S. Lewis’s four loves and Erich Fromm’s humanistic Art of Loving, concluding Fromm’s non-theistic account best fits today.
Review of David Galston’s Restoring Humanism to Religion (2025), which argues that religion must recover its humanist roots through ‘religiousness’. The reviewer admires the book but doubts that ‘religiousness’ is the right word for a rich humanism.
Series of articles on the Quaker, Catholic and humanist traditions that feed the Network, covering George Fox, apophatic Catholic mysticism and Vatican II, and the humanist organisations.
Reads the kingdom of God, Paul’s cosmic Christ and Revelation’s new Jerusalem as a humanist vision of a just society that humans themselves can struggle for.
Argues that the Network’s task has shifted to offering a new way of being religious, with love of neighbour primary, God-concepts understood as human, and religions continually reinventing themselves.
Anastasia Somerville-Wong argues that congregations are declining and proposes independent humanistic social enterprises, multi-faith chaplaincy and shared retreat and pilgrimage sites as models of ethical and spiritual leadership.
Andrew Copson describes spiritual experience for humanists as positive, subjective, non-rational and self-transcending, and finds its sources in belonging to nature, knowing oneself and connection to other people and the human story.
Reflects on the Holy Spirit and the Trinity, arguing that God is a human creation, that Christianity is the mother of humanism, and that theology and poetry are sister arts.
Penny Mawdsley reviews The Little Book of Humanism by Andrew Copson and Alice Roberts, an anthology of quotations with illustrations that introduces humanism gently and may help celebrants and those planning rites of passage.