So have we reached the end of the line? Do the latest failures and miscalculations — the relentless assault on the al-Shifa Hospital, the fatal airstrike on aid-workers, the targeting of an Iranian General in Damascus, while Hamas’s hostages languish …
Britain’s future is Pagan
The West Country is better known for Poldark’s smoulder than the fires of Paganism. But, as a local Heathen priest, I can assure you that the Pagan revival down here is in full swing. Just last week, a builder working …
Jesus at the end of history
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The hardest word in Hegel’s notoriously difficult Phenomenology of Spirit appears in the book’s final sentence. It is not a dense new German construction, but the translation of a Hebrew place name. Or, perhaps better, of an Aramaic place name,
The West has a deviancy problem
When and why did American life become so coarse, amoral and ungovernable? In his classic 1993 essay, “Defining Deviancy Down”, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered a semantic explanation. He concluded that, as the amount of deviant behaviour increased …
The truth about Jews for Palestine
At London’s weekly anti-Israel protests each Saturday, one can often find a small group of strictly Orthodox Jewish men — always men or boys, never women. Generally no more than a dozen, they hold signs with wording such as “Judaism: …
How Islamophobic is Lee Anderson?
Sometime during the late 20th century, the Irish Republican movement decided to align itself with the Palestinian cause in an attempt to build — as they saw it — a kind of global anti-colonial alliance. In response, the Loyalist movement …
Islamism is exploiting Britain’s political vacuum
Way back in 2005, when I was an MP in the Netherlands, my party was strategising about the upcoming local elections. I belonged to the centre-right VVD, and we were particularly concerned about appealing to the nation’s growing migrant community. …
The burden of Jewish privilege
We Jews have an old joke about the Holocaust: Abie Cohen, after being gassed and burnt in Auschwitz, goes to heaven. After a few weeks of waiting patiently, he eventually gets to see God and demands to know if the …
Is it naive to believe asylum seekers?
Elizabeth I put it best. “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls.” In other words, who knows what people really believe? When I baptise people, I ask them — or those who stand in for them — …
CS Lewis and the myth of Christmas
From afar came merchant-men,
Bringing, on tidings of this birth, rich gifts
In golden trays; goat-shawls, and nard and jade…
This is clearly not a conventional Christian nativity. The epic poem of which these lines form a part tells another …
Our Godless era is dead
Sometimes I think I’ve been lied to my whole life.
Everyone, everywhere, lives by a story. This story is handed to us by the culture we grow up in, the family that raises us, and the worldview we construct for …
What Pagans can learn from Christianity
“I do not know much about gods,” wrote T.S. Eliot in The Dry Salvages, “but I think that the river is a strong brown god.” Eliot was a devout Anglican, but he lived at a time when classical education and …
Jerusalem is Israel’s future
For a brief moment, when I was younger, I found myself in Jerusalem. By day I studied the Talmud with my teacher, and by night I wandered its streets.
I would veer into the dark alleyways of the Old City, …
Putin’s patron saint of nuclear weapons
During a service this autumn, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow wished a happy birthday to one of his congregants in the Church of Christ the Saviour. It was no ordinary salutation. Radii Il’kaev, who had just turned 85, was a nuclear …
Human rights died in Gaza
Religions die hard. They promise something better, something truer, more powerful and lasting than our familiar cruelties, corruptions and deaths. Their traditions take shape over time; they develop rituals, build communities, give life order and meaning, and at their best …