As big questions go, you can’t get much bigger than “What is the meaning of life?” It is a question that is often modified ...

Think of a mystery musical instrument. If a physicist is told the loudness of the sound it makes at every possible frequency, in principle they can use this information to figure out the shape of the ...

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

For many generations in societies shaped by Christianity, monogamy has been the almost undisputed champion of relationship norms. In Britain and the US, it has been held up as the dominant – really ...

God: An Anatomy (Pan Macmillan) by Francesca Stavrakopoulou. We don’t know his real name. In early inscriptions it appears as Yhw, Yhwh, or simply Yh; but we don’t know how it was spoken. He has come ...

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 ...

The popular association of atheism with immorality is a particular deterrent for women who have religious doubts, since in Arab society they are expected to be “virtuous” in order to marry. “It is ...

Can the Integrated Education Act help to break the segregation of Catholic and Protestant education in Northern Ireland?

The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power and People (Princeton University Press) by Paul Seabright Not long ago, religion seemed to be in terminal decline. But, as Paul Seabright ...

Jacob Bloomfield's new book, "Drag: A British History", is an excellent introduction to the complexities of drag as “a queer art form” ...

London's Soho in 1976 The Diaries of Mr Lucas: Notes from a Lost Gay Life (Atlantic Books) by Hugo Greenhalgh Meet George Leo Lucas. At the turn of the 1970s, he is a middle-aged civil servant in ...

This article is a preview from the Winter 2017 edition of New Humanist. How many of us haven’t in some idle moment imagined what the world might be like if it had always been run by women? Not that ...