Religion

Thursday

Peter Jones

True dedication

Benjamin Clementine, who won the 2015 Mercury Music Prize for his debut album At Least For Now, received his cheque for £20,000 and the trophy and, breaking down in tears, ‘dedicated his award to the victims of the Paris terror attacks’. One may be given leave to doubt it. In the ancient world, people of all backgrounds made dedications, from soldiers thanking gods for their escape from a nasty situation in battle to those who had had a threatening dream or wished to demonstrate their piety. Often people made ‘votive’ offerings (votum, ‘vow’), i.e. after vowing to the god that if they e.g. escaped a storm, they would make a

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Will politicians finally admit that the Paris attacks had something to do with Islam?

The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault. In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have ‘nothing to do with Islam’. It was said by George W. Bush after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7 and Tony Abbott after the Sydney attack last month. It is what David Cameron said after two British extremists cut off the head of Drummer Lee Rigby in London, when ‘Jihadi John’ cut off the head of

Thursday

Tom Holland

Of gods and men

Over the stupefyingly long course of Egyptian history, gods have been born and they have died. Some 4,000 years ago, amid the chaos that marked the fragmentation of the original pharaonic state, an incantation was inscribed on the side of a coffin. It imagined a time when there had been nothing in existence save a single divine Creator. ‘I was alone in the emptiness,’ the god proclaimed, ‘and could find no place to stand.’ Nevertheless, beside him, he could feel the gods that were yet to exist. ‘They were with me, these deities waiting to be born. I came into being and Becoming became.’ The gods emerged, to reign first

Monday

Theo Hobson

The Pope is trying to be the good cop. So who will be the bad cop?

The Pope has in effect said this to his Catholic flock: Let our rhetoric be liberal; Let us sound like a Church that is moving from harsh rigour to soft friendliness. Does that mean he seeks the reform of any of the Church’s traditional teachings? God knows. He began his US tour in Washington, where he warned the bishops that there is a temptation ‘to think back on bygone times and to devise harsh responses’. They should try to persuade people ‘with the power and closeness of love’ rather than obsessively condemning ‘their positions, distant as they may be from what we hold as true and certain’. In his final

Thursday

Theo Hobson

Corbyn’s salvation

On religion, Jeremy Corbyn is interestingly moderate, circumspect — not the angry atheist you might expect. In a recent interview with the Christian magazine Third Way, he said his upbringing was quite religious: his mother was a ‘Bible-reading agnostic’ and his father a believer, and he went to a Christian school. ‘At what point did you decide that it wasn’t for you?’ he was asked. He replied very carefully, even challenging the premise of the question: ‘I’m not anti-religious at all. Not at all… I find religion very interesting. I find the power of faith very interesting. I have friends who are very strongly atheist and wouldn’t have anything to

Tuesday

Theo Hobson

There was nothing illiberal about Ben Carson’s ‘Muslim president’ comment

Republican hopeful Ben Carson was asked on television whether a president’s religious faith matters. He said that a president’s faith should be compatible with the Constitution of the US. Asked whether that included Islam, he denied it. ‘I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.’ He has been accused of Islamophobia and of disregarding the Constitution itself, which states that ‘no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office’. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has called for Carson to withdraw from the race. His answer was clumsy, but not essentially wrong. The US Constitution does

Sunday

Theo Hobson

Could the Church of England follow a third way on homosexuality?

Are you already dreading Christmas, on account of having to host relatives who hardly bother hiding how much they hate each other? Well spare a thought for Justin Welby, who will host a big powwow of global Anglican leaders in January – many of the Anglican primates he will host don’t bother hiding their mutual antipathy at all. He is doing the brave and right thing, trying to agree a new looser model of communion, in which the 38 provinces declare themselves in communion with Canterbury, but not necessarily with each other. Such a move would confirm the current situation as the new normal, which is definitely the least worst option.

Thursday

Christopher Howse

Remembering P.J. Kavanagh

‘Elms at the end of twilight are very interesting,’ wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in his journal: ‘Against the sky they make crisp scattered pinches of soot.’ P.J. Kavanagh, who has died aged 84, plucked out this observation for one of the columns that he wrote for The Spectator between 1983 and 1996. He was right to call a volume collecting these Life and Letters columns (with a later series from the TLS) by the name A Kind of Journal, for they possess the kind of narrative impetus that makes classic diaries such as Woodforde’s or Kilvert’s so compelling. But they were also a poet’s work-books, just as living in rural

Wednesday

Theo Hobson

Will Jeremy Corbyn boost his left-wing idealism with a religious message?

One major defect of Jeremy Corbyn has not yet been discussed. He’s not a religious believer. Why is this a defect?  Because these days left-wing idealism is hugely boosted by an alliance with religion. Only so can it widen its appeal beyond a chippy clique. Maybe he’s half-aware of this. In a recent interview with the Christian magazine Third Way, he said that his upbringing was quite religious, and that he retains some sympathy with faith: ‘I’m not anti-religious at all. Not at all… I find religion very interesting. I find the power of faith very interesting. I have friends who are very strongly atheist and wouldn’t have anything to do

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Christianity is silent on my great moral dilemma

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremycorbynsbritain/media.mp3″ title=”Matthew Parris and Theo Hobson debate the role Christianity in the migrant crisis” startat=1383] Listen [/audioplayer]Proximity shouldn’t make a difference — should it? We were on a beach on the European side of the Mediterranean, it was a beautiful late August day, and I felt so happy. The sea was fresh, the sky was clear and a stiff breeze was whipping white horses out past the headland. ‘Rough weather for migrants,’ I thought, then checked myself. What an awful thing to think. There really would be migrants out there somewhere over the horizon; desperate people; people who, had they been visible to me — were they, Heaven forbid,

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Edinburgh on Thames

Showstopper! The Improvised Musical offers a brand new song-and-dance spectacular at every performance. It opens with a brilliantly chaotic piece of comedy. A theatre producer on stage telephones Cameron Mackintosh and pitches him a new musical. Mackintosh answers and the producer invites ideas from the audience. ‘What’s the setting?’ Someone yelled ‘Late-night sauna’ at the performance I saw. The producer, without missing a beat, told Mackintosh that the show would be called, Sweat, Sweat, Sweat. If that was improvised it was world-class. The show develops along the lines suggested by the crowd and a number of hit musicals are parodied. The audience, I suspect, enjoyed this more than me. The

Monday

Theo Hobson

Here’s what Tim Farron should have said to John Humphrys and Cathy Newman

Three interesting bits of theology in the media last week, two of them thanks to Tim Farron. Interviewing Farron, John Humphrys noted that he has said that he seeks ‘guidance from God’ in prayer, on important decisions. Shouldn’t voters be concerned about this turn away from normal evidence-based decision-making? A foolish question. Farron rightly replied that it surely wasn’t so shocking if a Christian said his prayers. What next? Humphrys: So, Mr Farron, you were heard just last Sunday publicly expressing the wish that ‘God’s kingdom’ should come, and I quote, ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. That would surely be a total change to Britian’s political system, and to

Thursday

Mark Greaves

God’s new business plan

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/workingwithal-qa-eda/media.mp3″ title=”Mark Greaves discusses the Church of England’s plans for growth” startat=1513] Listen [/audioplayer]A new mood has taken hold of Lambeth Palace. Officials call it urgency; critics say it is panic. The Church of England, the thinking goes, is about to shrink rapidly, even vanish in some areas, unless urgent action is taken. This action, laid out in a flurry of high-level reports, amounts to the biggest institutional shake-up since the 1990s. Red tape is to be cut, processes streamlined, resources optimised. Targets have been set. The Church is ill — and business management is going to cure it. Reformers say they are only removing obstacles that hinder the

Wednesday

Nick Cohen

Keep the cops away from the radical clerics, be they Christian or Muslim

If you want to see our grievance-ridden, huckster-driven future, looks to Northern Ireland, which has always been a world leader in the fevered politics of religious victimhood and aggression. Just as the Tories and much of the politically-correct liberal centre think they can force us to be nice by allowing the cops to arrest those who ‘spread hate but do not break laws’ (in George Osborne’s sinister words) so Northern Ireland has all kinds of restrictions of ‘hate speech’ to police its rich and diverse tradition of religious bigotry. I suppose it was inevitable that they would catch 78-year-old Pastor James McConnell of the Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle in North Belfast.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Benedict’s back

One of the finest speeches Benedict XVI ever delivered was about sacred music. It is a small masterpiece, in which Benedict recalls his first encounter with Mozart in the liturgy. ‘When the first notes of the Coronation Mass sounded, Heaven virtually opened and the presence of the Lord was experienced very profoundly,’ he said. Benedict robustly defended the performance of the work of great composers at Mass, which he insisted was necessary for the fulfilment of the Second Vatican Council’s wish that ‘the patrimony of sacred music [is] preserved and developed with great care’. Then he asked: what is music? He identified three places from which it flowed. First, the

Thursday

Rod Liddle

You can’t take the Islam out of Islamic State

At last, British politicians have been galvanised into action by the appalling events last weekend in the Tunisian resort of Sousse, in which 38 people were murdered by an Islamist terrorist. Yes, yes, about time, you might be muttering to yourself — but credit where it’s due, please. They may be a little late to the party but at least they have arrived. A convocation of 120 of our MPs, including Boris Johnson, have demanded strong and forthright action. They have written to the BBC demanding that it stop using the term ‘Islamic State’ to describe the organisation responsible for the attack, because it might upset that seemingly diminishing, if

Wednesday

Ed West

Western idealism is making the jihad problem much worse

I’ve just been reading Jonathan Sacks’ excellent new book, Not in God’s Name, which sets out to explain why people kill for religion. Although he explores the theology of the Old Testament, Rabbi Sacks also looks at evolution and evolutionary psychology to explain the unending human tendency to have in-groups and out-groups. This will be familiar to people who have read The Righteous Mind or Big Gods, which the former chief rabbi cites. What’s especially interesting is that he argues that the prevailing ideology of the west – a sort of liberalism that aims at abolishing identity and replacing it with individualism – is actually part of the problem. This

Thursday

James Delingpole

Oh God, don’t let the Pope be a climate fanatic

In his latest encyclical Pope Francis will apparently describe global warming as a ‘major threat to life on the planet’. If the leaked reports are accurate, his Holiness is absolutely right. Here are some examples of the havoc ‘global warming’ has wrought in the past decade: Honduras:US-backed security forces implicated in the killing of more than 100 peasant farmers involved in disputes with palm-oil magnates. Kenya: Teenage boy shot in February this year while protesting against a ‘wind park’ in Nyandarua. Mt Elgon National Park, Uganda: According to a newspaper report, more than 50 locals killed by park rangers and 6,000 evicted to make space for a ‘carbon offset’ plantation.

Matthew Adams

Curious shades of Browne

On the evening of 10 March 1804, Samuel Taylor Coleridge settled at a desk in an effort to articulate what he found so appealing about the 17th-century English polymath Sir Thomas Browne, the man he numbered among his ‘first favourites’ of English prose. He mentions Browne’s formal qualities, of course: he is ‘great and magnificent in his style and diction’; his Urne-Buriall ‘redolent of graves and sepulchres’ in every line. Yet most of his praise is reserved for Browne’s sensibility, for a man who is ‘fond of the curious, and a hunter of oddities and strangeness’; who ‘loved to contemplate and discuss his own thoughts and feelings, because he found

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Crisis of faith

It’s often said that Britain’s church congregations are shrinking, but that doesn’t come close to expressing the scale of the disaster now facing Christianity in this country. Every ten years the census spells out the situation in detail: between 2001 and 2011 the number of Christians born in Britain fell by 5.3 million — about 10,000 a week. If that rate of decline continues, the mission of St Augustine to the English, together with that of the Irish saints to the Scots, will come to an end in 2067. That is the year in which the Christians who have inherited the faith of their British ancestors will become statistically invisible.