Society

Utopia brasileira

Within less than a decade, Brazil will have as many evangelicals as Catholics, a transcendence born of the prosperity gospel

Alex Hochuli

The script creator

Pau Cin Hau dreamt of an alphabet for a language that had never been written down. So began the religion of Laipianism

Bikash K Bhattacharya

Witches around the world

The belief in witches is an almost universal feature of human societies. What does it reveal about our deepest fears?

Gregory Forth

The paradoxes of Mikha’il Mishaqa

He was a Catholic, then a rationalist, then a Protestant. Most of all, he exemplified the rise of Arab-Ottoman modernity

Peter Hill

Conscientious unbelievers

How, a century ago, radical freethinkers quietly and persistently subverted Scotland’s Christian establishment

Felicity Loughlin

The six priestesses who kept the flame of ancient Rome alight at risk of death

5 minutes

Inventing Hindu supremacy

Vinayak Savarkar ridiculed Gandhi, preaching that anti-Muslim violence was the only means to unite India into a nation

Mihir Dalal

There was no Jesus

How could a cult leader draw crowds, inspire devotion and die by crucifixion, yet leave no mark in contemporary records?

Gavin Evans

Witch hunts persist as a horrifying, deadly reality in pockets of rural India

24 minutes

Indomitable Sufis

Once a centre of Afghan culture, Sufism seems to have disappeared in the maelstrom of war and upheaval. But still it survives

Annika Schmeding

Hear from blasphemes, sceptics and free-thinkers in this ‘tour of medieval unbelief’

52 minutes

Secularism in Iran

Postcolonial intellectuals and Iran’s rulers agree that secularism is just Western imperialism in disguise. They are wrong

Patrick Hassan & Hossein Dabbagh

Meet the absentee gods and nefarious spirits of ancient Mesopotamia

6 minutes

Praying in shoes

The Sunni movement of Salafism was born at the beginning of the 20th century, with the goal of modelling life on the 7th

Aaron Rock-Singer

How Jewish leaders in the US are fighting abortion bans on religious grounds

24 minutes

From God’s shoes to satellites in heaven – children weigh in on religion

8 minutes

The Arab Kingdom

Amid the chaos of the First World War, a new pan-Arab empire was proclaimed. It faltered, but its historical lessons remain

Adam Mestyan

Miracles not magic

It took a tremendous effort to distinguish early Christianity from the finely tuned world of pagan beliefs and rituals

Martha Rampton

Warfare as mercy and love

The daggers that knights carried to the crusades help us understand why they thought of holy war as an act of love

William Chester Jordan