“I write as a victim …….to modernity” says Dominic Kirkham. “As one who was brought up a Roman Catholic, received all my education in Catholic institutes, becoming a teacher and then – after seemingly interminable years at a seminary – being ordained as a priest, and spending nearly thirty years…
Free Inquiry invited its readers to submit autobiographical essays describing ‘the life-stance odysseys that had led them to their present positions of secular humanism or atheism’. An earlier and well-known exponent of this type of writing was Bertrand Russell’s essay Why I am not a Christian. The editors received forty-two…
First there was the Shah’s dictatorship, then that of Khomeini and the mullahs. Iran has been suffering for a long time. The totalitarian theocracy has executed over 120,000 of the opposition. Azam was a young Iranian girl who grew up in the poor quarters of Tehran. Her father, as a supporter of the mullahs,…
Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), Pre- Raphaelite artist and friend of William Morris, was known to exclaim, “Belong to the Church of England? Put your head in a bag!” The Catholic Church and its services were “wicked.” The Methodists produced “psychical difficulties” in the artist and a mosaic commission for the decoration…
In this short book of 50 pages, John Severs brings together a wide range of subversive writers, from ancient times to Richard Dawkins, who dared to question religious (mostly Christian) doctrines and put forward alternative views, in some cases paying for it with their lives. Some of them are little…
Biographies can transform the retelling of history and produce a romanticised and possibly distorted narrative. Eleanor Marx is one of those iconic figures who attracts biographies, well, because of her iconic status. Few of them contain new material and there is in fact little to add to Yvonne Kapp’s definitive…
