Religion

What is a cult?

Cults are exploitative, weird groups with strange beliefs and practices, right? So what about regular religions then?

Tara Isabella Burton

Monks with guns

Westerners think that Buddhism is about peace and non-violence. So how come Buddhist monks are in arms against Islam?

Michael Jerryson

Understanding other religions is fundamental to citizenship

Kenneth Primrose

Christians were strangers

How an obscure oriental cult in a corner of Roman Palestine grew to become the dominant religion of the Western world

Michael Kulikowski

Black atheists matter: how women freethinkers take on religion

Christopher Cameron

Why some Chinese millennials are taking up the hermit’s life in the mountains

11 minutes

Before Indiana Jones came Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron

Blake Smith

Religion without belief

Most Japanese reject religious belief while embracing multiple forms of ritual practice. Are they religious or secular?

Christopher Kavanagh

What happened when a Muslim student went to Cambridge in 1816

Nile Green

Charisma is a mysterious and dangerous gift

John Potts

Against Muslim unity

Even the pilgrimage to Mecca exposes the myth of a united Islam and the formative power of the wider world

Faisal Devji

Is God a silverback?

Protective, omnipotent, scary and very territorial. The monotheistic God is modelled on a harem-keeping alpha male

David P Barash

Six centuries of secularism

When the first ‘how-to’ books began to explain the way the world worked, they paved the way for science and secularism

William Eamon

Medieval graffiti

Graffiti on the walls of Europe’s old churches reveals the real Middle Ages – a world far removed from knights and damsels

Matthew Champion

American secular

The founding moment of the United States brought a society newly freed from religion. What went wrong?

Sam Haselby

The medieval senses were transmitters as much as receivers

Chris Woolgar

Spare the rod

Christian Domestic Discipline and the erotics of religious submission raise the possibility of a new concept of God

Tara Isabella Burton

Islam’s forgotten bohemians

With its subversive poetry, rejection of politics, and ecstatic rituals, Sufi Islam continues to surprise and to thrive

Nile Green

The strange, short career of Judeo-Christianity

Gene Zubovich

Fort Dix and FBI entrapment – a suspect victory in the War on Terror

12 minutes

Why ISIS hates the Sufis and blows up their shrines

Nile Green

The French football team and the contest for a diverse nation

Tony Karon

The secular front in the US

John Fea