It’s amazing what’s changed since June 18th 2005, when Karen Watts and Martin Reijns were married by Ivan Middleton at Edinburgh Zoo. Then there were only 12 celebrants authorised to conduct marriage. Now the HSS has ten times that number. Then the society could have counted its membership in the hundreds. Today there are more than 10,000 […]
Irresistible image by Martin Rowson… And excellent words by Sally Feldman in the Autumn 2014 edition of New Humanist
Big thanks to Natasha from SWD for interviewing me for her blog on what makes Humanist weddings so special. The pic above comes from Kevin & Kellie’s wedding at Edinburgh Castle at the end of last year which was a blast, and you’ll get a sense of it if you take a moment to read […]
Is what we all seek in our different ways. BBC Radio Scotland gave me a call the other day asking for my thoughts, so I joined the former Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway. to discuss how we can live more balanced lives on the Sunday Morning programme that goes out at an hour you’re still deeply asleep. The […]
I was really pleased to see this article in Comment is Free today. It points out the connection between the inexorable rise of the Humanist wedding ceremony here in Scotland and the question on religion in the forthcoming Census – or at least it would do if the editors in their wisdom hadn’t chopped my […]
We’ve been waiting a long time to see this story in Scotland on Sunday (and thanks are due to Marc Horne the journalist for breaking the story). Four years, in fact, ever since Gordon Ross, who was then the National Ceremonies Convenor, got his calculator out and ‘did the math’ as the Americans say.That was back […]
The day after the article on body donation appeared in Scotland on Sunday, I got a call from a producer at BBC Radio Scotland, who asked if I’d be prepared to visit the Anatomy Lab at the School of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where Dr Gordon Linklater would show me precisely what will […]
The School of Medicine at The University of Edinburgh. Not as a student, but as an object of study… Read this article by Peter Ross that first appeared in Scotland on Sunday The BBC obviously read it, because they asked me not just to go on the radio and talk about it, but to go […]
When the Pope’s visit was announced some time ago, the HSS debated long and hard about how we should respond, and eventually decided that while we agree with all the arguments put forward by the Protest the Pope campaign, because of where we live and Scotland’s sectarian history, we’d have to do something different. So […]
I got a call the other day from Catherine Salmond at the Edinburgh Evening News. She was writing a story because Elizabeth Bell, the wedding co-ordinator at Houston House Hotel, had got in touch with the paper to say that 1 in 10 of their weddings this year are going to be Humanist ceremonies. So we had a chat […]