Religion

Perhaps it’s my imagination, but every time the Rt Rev James Jones, former Bishop of Liverpool, pops up on Thought for the Day I hear an undertone of disappointed ambition. The same goes for Lord Harries, ex-Bishop of Oxford and, like Jones, once spoken of as a future Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s as if they’re saying: look how much poetry and gravitas I can pack into three minutes! I’d have been jolly good at Lambeth… listen to ‘Thought for the Day from the Rt Rev James Jones’ on Audioboo

Once again, a feeble desire to be democratic and appeal to potential church-goers has led the C of E into muddy waters. No, I’m not talking about women bishops, but the Church of England’s much more significant — and damaging – decision, rubber stamped last Sunday, to remove the Devil from the liturgy of Baptism. Instead of being asked to reject ‘the devil and all rebellion against God’, parents at a Christening will now blandly be asked to ‘turn away from sin’. The change of language means the liturgy is now so removed from the original Book of Common Prayer as to be unrecognisable, but members of the Synod were

Well, I think nobody really assumed that George Carey was the brightest button on the bench of bishops but the old bumbler has still managed to put a rocket into the debate on assisted suicide. By dint of a former Archbishop of Canterbury changing horses on the issue, it has wrecked the notion that there’s some sort of consensus on the Anglican side about this contentious question. Whenever anyone tries to give a Christian account of the matter they’ll be met with the riposte, ah, but that’s not what the Archbishop says. But what gets me is the notion that it has come as a revelation to poor old George

In many ways I’ve endured enjoyed a very fortunate life. Not least because, perhaps unusually, I’ve had almost no dealings with the National Health Service. I mean, apart from a couple of vaccinations before trips to heathen foreign parts I’ve hardly seen a doctor since I left school. This surprises me as much as it may surprise you. So I’m never quite sure what passes for ‘good’ service on the NHS. What is normal in an organisation of its size, diversity and complexity? And how, in any case, do we measure ‘success’? I have a sneaking suspicion that we often do so by rebadging failure as normal. As I type this, you see,

According to my colleague Melanie McDonagh (Spectator 21st June), religion makes you happy and churchgoing is good for you. Crikey, you could have fooled me. For sure, an ancient church or cathedral is a peaceful and moving place to visit. Religious music can also be very affecting — I love Haydn’s many masses and adore Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle — as can be its art. But, as the man said when looking at some vast triptych of the Crucifixion, ‘Great story, shame it ain’t true.’ I was confirmed into the Church of England when I was seventeen. I had agonised about this for ages and was a good three or

‘I deserted my children for my own personal happiness: it is as simple as that, regardless if I sometimes reassure myself with caveats, with a rationale which I have constructed for myself out of cardboard or tinplate over the years.’ So writes Rod Liddle in his brutally honest memoir-cum-polemic Selfish Whining Monkeys, which got a huge boost last Friday thanks to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s rational and entirely sane attack on him on Channel 4 (see above). I admit to being a fan of Rod. Like James Delingpole, I think of him as something of a  national treasure, although only in a sort of alternative reality — possibly a quite nightmarish one —

I agree with something Owen Jones has written, a confluence of beliefs that will next occur on September 15, 2319. Addressing the subject of Christian persecution, he argues in the Guardian: ‘It is, unsurprisingly, the Middle East where the situation for Christians has dramatically deteriorated in recent years. One of the legacies of the invasion of Iraq has been the purging of a Christian community that has lived there for up to two millennia. It is a crime of historic proportions.’ Most people have rather ignored this crime, as they have other incidents of anti-Christian persecution across Africa and Asia, for as the French philosopher Regis Debray put it: ‘The

Was anyone terribly surprised by the Social Attitudes Survey published today suggesting that most people thought that, in order to be British, you should be able to speak English? Some 95 per cent thought so; the only curiosity being that in 2006 the figure was as low as 86 per cent. Nor indeed is it terribly odd that, as the authors point out, the threshold for Britishness is getting higher. As the survey from January points out, three in four people think immigration numbers should be reduced; the question of identity has to be seen in that context. One interesting aspect of the survey is the decrease in the numbers

Canon Andrew White is one of the bravest men you could ever meet. He is the Anglican vicar of St George’s Church in Baghdad and has continued his service in that country throughout its recent horrors. He has lost hundreds of members of his congregation but he has remained an extraordinary, humbling and hope-giving presence throughout recent years. But now, with ISIS having taken over Mosul and surrounding areas in recent hours, he says that things are worse than at any point in the last decade. This, Nineveh, is the heartland of Iraqi Christianity. In this heart-breaking call for help, Canon White writes: ‘Iraq is now in its worst crisis

Following Freddy Gray’s piece yesterday about the pundits’ efforts to exploit the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair in order discredit ‘faith’ schools, I thought you might be interested in the statement below, from the Catholic Education Service, which pretty well sums up the argument. One person the CES may have in its sights when it talks about the charge of indoctrination is the former Education Secretary, David Blunkett, who observed yesterday that: there was a ‘muddle’ in the heart of government when it comes to religious schooling. ‘Our society does need an open, liberal — small ‘l’ — curriculum that embraces all faiths and no faiths, and teaches children to think for