Religion
The Serpent’s Promise, by Steve Jones - review
The weight of bacteria that each of us carries around is equal to that of our brain, a kilogram of the creatures, billions of them, ten times as many in… Read more
The Church of England needs a compromise on gay marriage. Here it is
It is a wearyingly obvious observation, but the Church of England remains crippled by the gay crisis. It is locked in disastrous self-opposition, alienated from its largely liberal nature. Maybe… Read more
Richard Dawkins has lost: meet the new new atheists
The atheist spring that began just over a decade ago is over, thank God. Richard Dawkins is now seen by many, even many non-believers, as a joke figure, shaking his… Read more
Satan is back
It used to be said by Catholic priests back in the 1950s that the Devil was delighted when human beings decided that he did not exist. In those days it… Read more
A.C. Grayling
My friend and colleague Roy Brown has just sent me the draft of a statement he will submit to the UN Human Rights Council this spring, on behalf of the… Read more
Priests and pagans
The Catholic tradition of priestly celibacy (Latin caelebs, ‘unmarried’), by which Cardinal O’Brien was bound, is not a dogma, but a discipline. In other words, it can be altered at the… Read more
2 March 2013
On the BBC television news on Monday night, the first three items concerned alleged misbehaviour by the famous — Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Lord Rennard and Vicky Pryce, the ex-wife of… Read more
Sex, lies and the next Pope
In a corner of the Sistine Chapel, below Michelangelo’s hell, is a door to the little chamber they call ‘the room of tears’. Some painter-decorators are in there, frantically doing… Read more
AC Grayling vs God
‘Atheism is to theism,’ Anthony Grayling declares, ‘as not collecting stamps is to stamp-collecting’. At this point, we are supposed to enjoy a little sneer, in which the religious are… Read more
2 March 2013
Eight years ago I was in Rome for The Spectator to write a piece about the election of a new pope after the death of John-Paul II. Within two days,… Read more
The frontiers of freedom
The problem with Nick Cohen’s very readable You Can’t Read This Book is the way that you can, glaringly, read this book. This isn’t quite as glib an observation as… Read more
Helping our unbelief
Over 125 of the 320 pages in this book are either blank, or taken up with black-and-white illustrations, of subjects as various as Madonna and her former husband Guy Ritchie,… Read more
Friendships resurrected
A fact which often surprises those who pick up the Bible in adulthood, having not looked at it for years, is how very short the stories are. Adam and Eve,… Read more
The gay Lambeth way
Archbishop Edward Benson was the ideal of a Victorian churchman. Stern and unbending, he was a brilliant Cambridge scholar and a dreamily beautiful youth. Older men fell over themselves to… Read more
When wailing is appropriate
This is a strange exercise. It is a commonplace book of quotations from great authors, assembled by the philosopher A. C. Grayling. The extracts from the great books, how- ever,… Read more
Great among the nations
The King James Bible, while uniting the English-speaking world, gave birth to centuries of radicalism and Dissent. On its 400th anniversary, Philip Hensher examines the translation’s legacy Considered as a… Read more
Sins of the fathers
The trouble about writing a history of the popes is that there are so many of them. Usually elderly when elected, most of them have only lasted a few years.… Read more
So farewell, John Bull
His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Fisher, keen to counter the dreadful spectre of the atomic bomb in the 1950s, observed that the very worst it could do would… Read more
The battle for the holy city
In a tour de force of 500 pages of text Simon Sebag Montefiore, historian of Stalin and Potemkin, turns to a totally different subject: the city of Jerusalem. Founded around… Read more
Can it be described?
Where was God in the Holocaust? This question confounds even learned rabbis, so let’s not linger there. Where was God in the Holocaust? This question confounds even learned rabbis, so… Read more
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