Durham Cathedral demands Covid passports for Christmas worship
Durham Cathedral is dividing its flock into sheep and goats for Christmas. The Dean is setting the Covid-vaccinated sheep on his right hand, but the goats who lack an NHS…
Matthew Parris just wants to be loved, accepted, and buried in the CofE
Matthew Parris has written a strange a piece in the Times about the Church of England: 'Anglicanism was never really about God', he decrees, with a kind of semi-detached secular-papal journalistic infallibility. His Epistle to the Thundererarians drifts between theological…
Queen reminds General Synod of its essential mission
The 11th General Synod of the Church of England was opened yesterday, and the Supreme Governor was absent for the first time since Synod was created more than 50 years…
Martyn Percy empathises with Holocaust victims, and a conspiracy emerges
We are supposed to believe that a Christ Church undergraduate was casually surveying the website of the Very Rev'd Professor Martyn Percy, as students at the University of Oxford regularly…
We will remember them
Nothing today: no words, except those of Robert Laurence Binyon: With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, England mourns for her dead across the sea. Flesh of her flesh…
No, the Church of England did not give £40,000 ‘gifts’ to a fantasist
In the Mail on Sunday last week there was an 'exposé' of a decision by the Church of England Interim Survivor Support Scheme whose panel had decided to compensate a…
Euthanasia: New Zealand Catholic Bishops make priests complicit
Euthanasia (/Assisted Dying/Assisted Suicide) is now legal in New Zealand. If you want to die there today, there is now someone to help you along your way with all the…
Environmental apocalypse: the religious drama of COP26
"Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets with suspicion," warned Primo Levi in his 1947 work If This Is…
Beyond the Odds: Providence in Britain’s Wars of the 20th Century
"At many times in the two World Wars, Britain was saved from disaster in circumstances that defied probabilities," we read on the cover of 'Beyond the Odds', a new book…
Little Amal blesses Cardinal Nichols in Westminster Cathedral
What's this about? Little Amal is a very big puppet, making the journey from Gaziantep near the Turkey-Syria border to Manchester, where "she will shine an urgent light on the…
Hardship of Life
Meet Munzir al-Nazzal and his five-year-old son Mustafa. They live in Reyhanli, in the Turkish province of Hatay, at the border with Syria. Munzir lost his right leg as he…
General Synod elections: the ‘liberal drift’ is not a foregone conclusion
The Rev'd Peter Ould has been psephological over at Psephizo, and his analysis of the recent Synod elections merits some consideration in respect of the 'liberal drift' of the Church…
Death is the price we pay for freedom
"We cannot have the death of an MP being a price worth paying for our democracy," said Labour's Harriet Harman on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme. "It can't be…
Sir David Amess: “I was born a Catholic, and I will die a Catholic.”
Sometimes silence is best. Sometimes words can get in the way of a necessary contemplation or desirable meditation, and the murder of Conservative MP Sir David Amess is perhaps such…
Professor Priyamvada Gopal ‘cancelled’ by Home Office
Guido Fawkes highlighted earlier this week that Cambridge Professor Priyamvada Gopal had been invited to give a talk at the Home Office, to lecture civil servants as part of Black…
Archbishops’ Racial Justice Commission has just one Conservative member
The Archbishops' Racial Justice Commission was announced last week. It is a 12-member board, chaired by former Labour MP Paul Boateng, now Lord Boateng, and its members include just one…
Should you need a Covid vaccination certificate to attend church?
It was a question posed by the Rt Rev'd Peter Carrell, Bishop of Christchurch in the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia. Seeking the corporate wisdom and discernment…
Would Worcester College Oxford apologise for hosting the Pope?
Worcester College Oxford is among the fairest of the University. Founded in 1714, some of its buildings date back to 1283, when there was a Benedictine abbey on the site.…
Welby: there is no need to ‘save the parish’; there is no threat to it
The Archbishop of Canterbury recently made a very subtle intervention in the process of elections to the General Synod. Indeed, so subtle was it that absolutely nobody noticed. Just as…
Daniel Finkelstein: opponents of assisted dying are ‘radicals’
In his Times article today, Daniel Finkelstein insists that to legalise assisted dying (/suicide) would be "a small change"; a very modest development; a necessary and popular incremental reform. As…