Award-winning and best-selling author Philip Pullman was honored by the International Humanist and Ethical Union on Saturday, June 7, 2008, with its International Humanist Award at the World Humanist Congress, hosted by the American Humanist Association in Washington, DC. The following is adapted from his acceptance speech. THIS PAST OCTOBER I accepted an invitation to give a talk in the University Church in the city where I live, Oxford. St. Mary's Church is a beautiful building, and the priest in charge is a good and decent man. We had a public conversation that ranged over literature and science and education and politics, as well as religion. The church was full of students and older people, members of the congregation as well as people who just wanted their books signed, and it was a curious experience to be sitting where I was, just a foot or two away from one of the great stone pillars that happens to have a piece cut out of it. I looked at it from time to time with, as I say, a curious feeling; because that pillar had been cut into in 1555 to provide a shelf to support one corner of the platform on which the Protestant martyrs Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, and Thomas Cranmer stood during their trial for heresy. They were found guilty, of course--there was never any doubt that that was going to happen--and later burnt to death in the city. And there I was in exactly the same spot 450 years later explaining why I didn't believe in God, whether Protestant or Catholic, and no one was going to burn me. On the contrary, later we had a very convivial supper together.
