Zoe Williams
Zoe Williams was made a patron of Humanists UK for her journalism on issues of concern to humanists.
Journalist
The only evidence for the death of community spirit is the few noisy people who insist upon its demise…
Zoe Williams is a regular columnist in The Guardian and New Statesman . Journalist Clive James has praised her on his website, “not just for her sanity but for her wonderfully unencumbered style, alive with the rhythms of a wild conversation she is having with herself.”
“Why don't unbelieving parents demand funding for schools of their own, to be run in accordance with the principles of environmentalism, or humanism?” she wrote in The Guardian on Wednesday October 4, 2006 “Man, they could run those C of E primaries off the league tables in a generation, in a decade, given the same resources and the same freedom to decide who is in and who is out. There seems to be a lingering embarrassment whenever atheism comes face to face with Christianity. It is assumed that the faithful command the authority, and deserve it. What kind of a group do non-believers constitute? Who would entrust them with a school budget? You might as well give it to anarchists. Well no, not really. There's nothing childishly rebellious or intellectually slothful about agnosticism. And there is nothing inherently morally superior about getting up early on a Sunday.” (Read the full story and readers’ comments here).
She has also written sympathetically about Quakerism (seehttp://www.newstatesman.com/200604100024 ), describing it as “ the most natural spiritual hearth of the left wing” but adding, “Now if I could just find it in myself to believe in God…”
See also
Guardian profile of Zoe Williams
Zoe Williams in The Guardian on 9/5/07: “Britain's on a civility binge ... some bad news for the doom-mongers: community spirit simply refuses to be killed off…"
ZoeWilliams on faith schools in The Guardian, September 2103