Category: Blog

It’s sort of Doubting Thomas day today, as he refused to believe until presented with the evidence, which he was on the eight day. Or was he? When we made the doubt programmes we asked Rowan Williams about Thomas. It didn’t make the cut. But here’s what he said. MV Perhaps the most famous doubter… Continue reading Rowan Williams on Doubting Thomas

How can one possibly understand the near ecstasy sparked by the royal wedding – the global fascination with the dress, the kiss, the love? Perhaps an archetypal reading can help. At any rate, it’s an interesting way of reflecting about the collective surge of feeling because alongside suggesting what is going so right for the… Continue reading What Wills and Kate unleash

This piece has just gone up at The Guardian’s Comment is free… Many tens of thousands of refugees have now fled Libya and crossed to the relative safety of Tunisia. Their stories will, no doubt, be ones of terror and horror. And yet, there are tales of deep humanity too in their flight. A UNHCR… Continue reading Tunisians' welcoming of Libyan refugees is altruism in action

‘Love is always a problem,’ Jung wrote in The Love Problem of a Student, an ‘intensely individual’ one, and is such that every ‘general criterion and rule loses its validity’ when we try to make sense of it – though, for the sake of our humanity, we must.

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