Category: Blog

I didn’t think of myself as much of a monarchist. But the number of disappointed republicans currently putting frustrated pen to paper, not least in the paper for whom I write, the Guardian, has made me think again. They’re caught between the manifest popularity of the royal wedding and their plea that we should not… Continue reading God save the queen!

Martin Amis hopes to convert his good friend Christopher Hitchens to agnosticism (hat tip: Jonathan Rowson). I remember Amis venturing the sensibility, and sensibleness, of not knowing in Hitchens’ presence somewhere before. After all, as Hitchens himself has written, ‘The measure of an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your… Continue reading Amis to Hitchens: be an agnostic

I’ve a piece up on Cif Belief reflecting on good blasphemy and bad blasphemy, having read James Frey’s new book. A taster: Of course, Jesus was himself accused of blasphemy. In the story that will be rehearsed in churches during holy week, Jesus is asked by the high priest whether he’s the son of the… Continue reading You have heard the blasphemy

The man behind the recently reported codices hoard, David Elkington, hits back in the current TLS, arguing that Peter Thonemann has dismissed the lead artifacts having only examined photos of the copper books – a confusion Elkington himself never made. He points out that the corrosion of the lead implies ancient provenance, not that they… Continue reading Christian codices more gold than lead?

I love the story about Nigella’s burkini. There’s the neologism itself. Fantastic. (Plus, the nice coincidence that nigellus is a word for black in Latin.) But there’s also the human insight it provides into why women might voluntarily want to cover – an insight that runs contrary to the logic of the French ban on… Continue reading Nigella's burkini and the staring state

Resurrection is just not believable to many folk, I was thinking again last night during our How To Face Death class. As is usual, only one or two considered the traditional Christian view at all plausible. And I’ve sympathy with the view. ‘Worm meat’ is the most commonly believed state, post-mortem. But what interests me… Continue reading Resurrection rises again

One of the insights of psychotherapy is that the desire to help someone, say by identifying a ‘fix’, is often ineffectual or unhelpful or possibly destructive. This might be for a number of reasons. The law of unintended consequences. Never really knowing as much as you think you know. The ‘hammer fallacy’ (when you’ve a… Continue reading Faith in a fix-it culture

Slavoj Zizek has been giving some new lectures at Birkbeck, London – including telling some new jokes (or at least, new to me.) One features a man in a coffee shop who asks the waiter for a coffee without milk. We don’t have any milk today, the waiter replies, but we do have cream. Would… Continue reading The one about the coffee…

When Galileo first gazed onto the surface of the moon through a telescope, he achieved a shift in humankind’s sense of itself. Ours was not the only world in the cosmos. The moon was earthlike too, with mountains and valleys. In ‘The Sidereal Messenger’, he commended his readers to the ‘great and marvelous sights’. It’s… Continue reading Copernican shifts and First Orbit