Great issue of the New Statesman, with thoughtful articles on secularism, one of those issues it is hard to do well in the media. Bryan Appleyard and Rowan Williams provide the meat, both, by different routes, coming to strikingly similar conclusion, that society needs a reference beyond itself to be itself - for Williams, it's the transcendent, that which is good whether we see it or not but can always call us to account; for Appleyard, what he calls, using network theory, a fixed node, to which all other parts of the network relate. Clearly, our problem is that there's no overt agreement on what that might be, though it's a step forward to recognise what's lost/at stake, and not to treat secularisation as merely the removal of religion, on the assumption that a 'natural', secular state will be revealed in its stead.

Alain de Botton writes provocatively on Comte's Religion of Humanity, though doesn't, to my mind, ask the crucial question which is why it failed. I think it's to do with the fact that religion can't be made, but must be discovered - a detail that I think did not strike the great social scientist, and inventor of sociology. There's a contribution from Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society too, arguing that its creed would be good for religion. Though it's a statement I find hard to square with their requirement of atheism for membership.

And there's a study of Indian secularism, which though not trouble free, roughly adds up to the state providing the environment, public and private, to let a thousand flowers bloom. It requires tolerance, though perhaps even moreso, a recognition that we need each other, or at least are in this together.