In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian”. It did not cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South …
Jews are not safe on Britain’s campuses
In my first year at university, in 2005, I vividly recall coming across a Guardian article by Luciana Berger headlined “Why I had to resign”. This was 14 years before she quit the “institutionally antisemitic” Labour Party; back then, she …
Does a near-death experience change you?
Two days before he died from cancer at the age of 39, my father was sitting in a hotel restaurant with my mother, in considerable discomfort. After a while, they noticed two very familiar people sitting at a table across …
Who is indigenous to Jerusalem?
Moments after the first images of the Hamas terror attack on October 7 hit the web, people on the Left started to cheer on the brutal assault as an act of “decolonising” Israel. “What did y’all think decolonisation meant?” tweeted …
How to rewild Christianity
There is much talk these days of Christianity being doomed: of churches closing, values fading, and community feeling ebbing. But was there ever a time when Christian Britain was one big, cuddly Richard Curtis film?
The New Atheism of the …
Reverend Pilavachi’s irresistible charisma
At the height of their fame, Rev Canon Pilavachi’s Soul Survivor festivals in Somerset drew 30,000 worshippers every summer. As a once-fervent young Baptist who grew up around Britain’s often-overlooked Charismatic Christian movement, I was one of them. The camps …
Do Israel’s critics understand Evil?
After the Holocaust, academics and others tried to make sense of the murder of six million Jews. Historians pointed to the rise of nationalism following the First World War; the dismal state of the German economy when Hitler rose to …
The shattering of the Jewish world
My father had told me, the night before, that he wanted to go to the synagogue, because of the festival, that it would be a happy time to be in the sanctuary. And so that morning, we went, knowing something …
Immigration is religion’s only hope
When my father was going through the process of becoming an Elder in the United Methodist Church, he was required to take courses on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. One course involved a presentation on how white people needed to make …
Has the Church stopped working?
Ever since the Enlightenment — in fact, ever since the ancient philosophers complained about the young and their lack of morals — religion has feared for its future. So the front page of The Times yesterday was hardly a scoop.…
Liberalism’s sin was born in the Cold War
If the contemporary political scene is strewn with wreckage, it is clearer than ever that “neoconservatism” and “neoliberalism” did much of the damage. More than any other, these two ideologies have afflicted both the centre-right and centre-left, fostering the sense …
Why you should be a thick traveller
Anthropology is in some ways an odd and creepy thing to do. Anthropologists spend a lot of time watching people, often people who are very different from themselves, in the hope of understanding them. If done wrong, as it has …
Putin’s holy war on Ukraine
As the world watched the Wagner mercenaries make good on their mutinous threats and advance on Moscow last month, Vladimir Putin shot them down in a television address. Spitting with rage and refusing to utter Prigozhin’s name, he said that …
The power of the Kennedy Myth
“Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry
Having asserted a claim to literacy, I will now tell you what I’ve been reading, and why. I read for …
One hundred years of platitudes
The worst sort of books make you feel clever without actually making you more so. They flatter your intelligence, encouraging you to nod along in smug agreement at some faux deep observation, giving you a sense of achievement without having …