I love the Church of England. I love its liturgy, I love its glorious parish churches, I love its lack of ideological fervour, I love the gentle and inclusive way that it is porous to those outside of the Church, …
The genesis of the MAGA Bible
It has been more than two decades since I walked away from the evangelical Christian faith in which I was raised as a preacher’s son, but I still know blasphemy when I see it. In an ad for his God …
Macho Christianity is flexing its muscles
Is he the messiah? Or just a very naughty boy? Since Russell Brand found Jesus he hasn’t stopped talking about it, whether on TikTok, or Tucker Carlson’s live show, or while baptising other men in a lake while clad only …
The cult of kindness
Last June, I walked down to our local public school here in the foothills of Los Angeles to pick up my son from his last day of kindergarten. As we were leaving, I snapped a picture of a sign on …
The illusion of a pagan West
Inside the Colosseum, in central Rome, stands a giant cross. Erected in 2000 by Pope John Paul II to commemorate the thousands of Christians martyred there, it’s not what you might expect to see on visiting the building once known …
Where is Kamala’s plan for women?
While Joe Biden found it hard to even say the A-word, Kamala Harris has always known that reproductive rights could be a winning issue for the Left come November — hence her reproductive freedom tour earlier this year. At the …
Nick Cave’s doctrine of doubt
Strange are the thoughts that steal upon you, a thousand feet underground in a Polish salt mine. Under the glow of chandeliers, surrounded by samizdat saints and kings, entire chapels carved in rock salt by generations of miners, I found …
Will Pope Francis kill the Latin Mass?
A month ago, 18,000 young people walked on pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres Cathedral in order to demonstrate their love of the Traditional Latin Mass — an intricate and solemn ceremony which, to the horror of Pope Francis, is attracting …
The trouble with political Christianity
In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, Jesus condemns those who “(either) love the tree and hate its fruit (or) love the fruit and hate the tree”. A regular critique of the nominally religious is that they claim to believe in, …
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 narcissism of wedding photographers
Photographers have long had an uneasy relationship with the sacred. There is the age-old anxiety that a photograph can steal a soul. And last week, more than 900 wedding photographers signed a petition complaining that “problematic vicars” can be “rude, …
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 …
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 — …
Christmas is a threat to Israel
Our carol service this year was unusually sombre. We gathered to hear once again the message of the angels, of the cry for the redemption of Israel, of peace on earth and goodwill to all. And we sang:
“Beneath the …
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 …