New Humanist Update

Our March/April issue is out now, and we lead with the shock result of the Russian elections as Michael Binyon reports on a stunning victory for the man upstairs.

OK, so God didn't actually win but, as Binyon says, Putin's continued grip on power is great news for the Russian Orthodox Church.

Much has been written of India's rapidly expanding middle class, but what effect has all this new-found wealth had on religious observance?

In an edited extract from her new book, Meera Nanda reveals how the more wealthy and urbanised Indians become, the more they are turning to a revitalised Hinduism.

When France introduced its ban on the wearing of religious symbols (i.e. headscarves) in public places in 2004, many people hailed it as a great victory for secularism. Not so, says Joan W Scott, who argues that the political roots of the ban are more sinister.

Thousands of miles away in Tehran, where the rule on headscarves is quite the opposite, Nina Power finds that Iran refuses to conform to Western expectations. Visiting the capital, she discovered widespread daily defiance of the regime, but open resistance to the idea of American intervention.

Turning to British domestic politics, Stephen Howe asks if we can really learn anything from the writings of former Islamist extremists. Starting with Ed Husain, the ex-Islamist's memoir has become something of a publishing phenomenon in the past year, but Howe isn't convinced these works really provide an insight into the mind of a terrorist.

Elsewhere in the new issue, Julian Baggini assesses the furore caused by Housing Minister Caroline Flint's suggestion that council house tenants should be expected to hold down jobs if they want to keep their homes. He wonders if she might have a point.

Our cartoonist Martin Rowson's new book The Dog Allusion has just been released by Vintage. It's his witty contribution to the ongoing "God debate" and in our extract he discusses how the human capacity for empathy allows us to make the world – including our gods and dogs – in our own image.

Visiting the eminent American sociologist Richard Sennett in his London home, Laurie Taylor finds what he thinks of Dawkins, New Labour and religion.

We open our book reviews with Natalie Haynes' glowing endorsement of Rose Shapiro's Suckers, an attack on alternative medicine that concludes that homeopathic drugs don't work.

Meanwhile, Andrew Mueller looks at the reissue of Simon Reynolds' Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. Despite his dislike of the music, Mueller was captivated by Reynolds' look back at the days of Acid House – a time when the participants found that the drugs most certainly did work (but then again, these drugs weren't homeopathic).

Elsewhere in books, we've also got Shirley Dent on Salman Rushdie's latest, Bill Thompson on Michio Kaku's impossibly bad science, Peter Wayne on Victorian spiritualism and Philip Womack on Hanif Kureishi's underwhelming new novel.

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