Christopher Hitchens obituary
Maverick, polemical journalist whose career was a rollercoaster of love and loathingFor most of his career, Christopher Hitchens, who has died of oesophageal cancer aged 62, was the left's biggest journalistic star, writing and broadcasting with wit,...
Why the New Atheism is a boys’ club | Victoria Bekiempis
Is it that female intellectuals are less rational and contrarian than male secularists? Or just that society prefers lionising men?Women are God-fearing and don't challenge institutions. Men, on the other hand, are skeptical and rational, and go out of...
Atheism’s aesthetic of enchantment
Two centuries on, it is timely to recall Shelley's argument for the non-existence of GodAs an Oxford undergraduate in the early 19th century, Percy Bysshe Shelley developed an argument for the non-existence of God. He entitled it The Necessity of Athei...
Tony Blair v Christopher Hitchens: fight the good fight
How the atheist polemicist and the Catholic politician debated whether religion is a force for good or evilChristopher Hitchens walked on stage with the evidence of his cancer plain for the world to see. His dark suit jacket hung off a much-reduced fra...
Rowan and Eagleton on atheism | Andrew Brown
The Archbishop of Canterbury and Terry Eagleton mount a joint attack on the New AtheistsTo Great St Mary's in Cambridge, on Friday night to hear Rowan Williams and Terry Eagleton discussing the New Atheism in front of about 1200 people. That's what the...
Guardian Focus podcast: Is religion a force for good?
In anticipation of the coming debate between Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair on the value of religion, we gathered a selection of thinkers on the subject to discuss the topic.AC Grayling is professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of...
‘You have to choose your future regrets’
In June Christopher Hitchens, the hard-drinking polemicist and atheist, met his toughest opponent yet when he was diagnosed with cancer. The question on many lips was: would his illness alter his beliefs – on Iraq, on Islam, on God? At home in Washin...
Science Weekly podcast: Maggie Philbin on Tomorrow’s World; plus, James Randi and PZ Myers
A packed show this week with a science legend live in the studio. Former Tomorrow's World presenter Maggie Philbin explains why the judges plumped for Nick Lane's book about evolution's greatest inventions to win this year's Royal Society Prize for Sci...
Job suffered alone – and so must we | Bernard Leikind
Many believe a caring, personal God has their welfare in mind, but the Book of Job provides little to support this view"There lived in the land of Uz a man of blameless and upright life named Job, who feared God and set his face against wrongdoing. He ...
What does prayer achieve? | Andrew Brown
If praying for someone else does them no good, what is the point of all those words and all that longing?When I consider my Christian academic friends – people who are smarter, better read and harder working than I am – it's clear that Christianity...
Beyond New Atheism? | Caspar Melville
I'm bored by New Atheism. It's time we move on and leave the years of irascible, impatient, blunt, godless discourse behindToday I have been defending New Atheism in the morning, and will be attacking it in the evening. At 9am, I debated the Christian ...
Hitchens – inspirational and infuriating