Podcast

This episode explores the legacies of women who challenged religious orthodoxy and patriarchal structures, laying the groundwork for modern humanist and feminist thought.

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Read the show notes: Heroines of Freethought

Many people assume humanism began with the Enlightenment. But sceptical, rational, human-centred ideas have a much longer history.

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Read the show notes: Atheism Before the Enlightenment 

Explore the long history of humanist campaigning in education — from the Victorian pioneers of the Moral Instruction League to the 20th century architects of ‘life-stance’ education and citizenship studies.

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Read the show notes: Moral Education Without Religion

Uncovering the close connections between the movements for sexual freedom and freedom of belief, from the sex-reform societies of the Victorian era to the decriminalisation campaigns of the mid-20th century, and the founding of the Gay Humanist Group (now LGBT Humanists).

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Read the show notes: Born of Mary

This episode explores the humanist ideas and individuals that helped to shape the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). From H. G. Wells’ pioneering wartime declaration to the concept of a ‘common human family’.

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Read the show notes: Universal Declaration of Human Rights

This episode explores Charles Bradlaugh’s long battle for the right to affirm in Parliament, and discusses how far we’ve come since the Oaths Act of 1880.

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This episode traces the humanist threads that ran through the civil rights movements on both sides of the Atlantic, from Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry in the United States to the Windrush generation, the 1965 Race Relations Act, and the Black British radical tradition of C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones and Darcus Howe.

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This episode explores how humanist ethics should reach beyond the human — an argument that Victorian reformers like Henry Salt and his Humanitarian League turned into a campaign for animal rights, vegetarianism, the abolition of vivisection and the reform of zoos and blood sports, and that runs in a long line through Bridget Brophy and the Oxford Group of the 1970s to the modern animal rights and vegan movements.

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From H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon to Naomi Mitchison, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany and the writers reimagining the genre of science fiction today, this episode asks how imagining the possible helps us change the present – and boldly go towards a better future.

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This episode explores the ideas and individuals at the heart of what became the welfare state, from the British idealists to the likes of Bevan and Beveridge.

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In this episode, we discuss “the open conspiracy” — a decades-long campaign by 94 leading humanists who set out to rewrite Britain’s moral laws, overturning moral theocracy in favour of individual autonomy, humanitarianism, and internationalism. From the decriminalisation of homosexuality and suicide to divorce law reform, abortion rights, nuclear disarmament, and the abolition of capital punishment, we trace the humanist influence on a staggering array of transformative changes.

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