Volume 122 Issue 2 March/April 2007
- Editorial: I respect your ignorance
- Humanists are not dogmatists obsessed with belief, says Caspar Melville
Cover Stories
- Hostile takeover
- A powerful coalition is trying to define Europe as Christian. And, warns Donald Sassoon, they must be stopped at once
Regulars
- End Game: Smarty pants
- Laurie Taylor finds he's too clever for his own good
Features
- Bad vibrations
- AC Grayling reports on the battle for the soul of a science
- Miracle workers
- The Vatican is fast-tracking Pope John Paul's canonisation. But, as Toby Saul discovered, he has still got something to prove
- Naughty but nice
- Contemporary pornography is a hideous distortion of the joys of sex. Yet, argues Nina Power, it could all have been so different
- Dancing with dinosaurs
- The Christian right is on the rise in America – thanks to the disastrous effects of globalisation, writes Chris Hedges
- Anti-God squad
- Caspar Melville speaks to the Rational Response Squad, America's new web-savvy atheist activists
- Slice of life
- For some it's barbaric, for others a religious imperative. But why, asks Sally Feldman, is circumcision still the most frequently performed operation in the world?
- Secret openings
- You don't have to be religious to experience inexplicable moments of epiphany, argues Laurie Taylor
- Schools for scoundrels
- Religious groups are rushing to take advantage of the Blair government's new education policy, reports Francis Beckett. And guess who's paying for it?
Columns
- Raise the roof
- Moses Kamya thanks New Humanist readers for their generous donations following the construction of a new classroom block at the Mustard Seed school, Uganda
- Diary
- Comedian Robin Ince is blinded by science
- Thinker: Adam Smith
- Nicholas Phillipson explains why the ideas of Adam Smith are still common currency today
Book Reviews
- Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties by Michael Lesy
- Michael Binyon is not blown away by the Windy City
- Terra Nullius: A Journey Through No One's Land by Sven Lundqvist
- Daniel Miller is battered and bruised by Sven Lundqvist
- The Comet Sweeper: Caroline Herschel's Astronomical Ambitions by Claire Brock
- Brenda Maddox is swept off her feet by an astronomical biography
- The Blackest Bird: A Novel of History and Murder by Joel Rose
- Martina Evans is haunted by the ghost of Poe
- How Life Imitates Chess by Garry Kasparov
- Winston Fletcher takes on Kasparov, and wins
- Karoo by Steve Tesich
- Michael Bywater rediscovers a masterly comic tragedy
