The Honest Ulsterman No. 1

This first issue of literary journal The Honest Ulsterman, includes contributions from a remarkable range of writers, including a number of humanists. Among these is John D. Stewart, a Belfast-born engineer and playwright, who was a vocal humanist, a founding figure in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), and a prominent part of the First Conference of Humanists in Ireland. To this issue of The Honest Ulsterman, Stewart contributed a humanist plea, ‘Let Us Be Human’, seeing the values of humanism as an essential part of addressing Northern Ireland’s sectarian conflict. Stewart was the son of a Presbyterian minister, but wrote: ‘I think I was born a humanist’. He suggested that his own experience of ‘taking communion’ without holding any actual religious belief, and in order to maintain respectability, was likely far more widespread than was acknowledged. Proof of Stewart’s own deep humanity was in his active pursuit of human rights for all, both as part of the humanist movement, and as a pioneering figure in the drive for civil rights in Northern Ireland.