Christianity

Thursday

Benedict Kiely

Save Syria’s Christians

David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, and Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, had rather tellingly different responses to the latest wave of violence in Syria. Lammy deplored the ‘horrific violence’ but failed to address where that violence was coming from. Rubio, by contrast, stated clearly that ‘radical Islamist terrorists’ were targeting minorities in Syria, including Alawites, Christians and Druze. Rubio is right. While precise numbers are difficult to ascertain, it appears that, according to a source verified by the Hungarian government’s State Secretariat for the Aid of Persecuted Christians – the only one in the world – up to 3,000 people may have been killed, the majority of them innocent

Wednesday

Damian Thompson

Christianity, culture wars and J.D. Vance: a conversation with James Orr

62 min listen

James Orr was living the life of a young, high-flying lawyer when, after a few drinks at a New Year’s Eve party, he asked for signs that God existed. The signs came; among other things, he narrowly avoided a fatal skiing accident. Now he is a passionate Christian and a conservative culture warrior who helped defeat an attempt to impose the tyranny of critical race theory on Cambridge University, where he is an associate professor of the philosophy of religion. He’s also an intellectual mentor to the vice president of the United States; Politico describes him as ‘J.D. Vance’s English philosopher king’. Dr Orr says Vance is ‘extremely articulate, but he takes

Thursday

Joanna Moorhead

The true birthplace of the Renaissance

The baby reaches out to touch his mother’s scarf: he studies her face intently, and she focuses entirely on him. There is connection; there is familiarity; there is love. It could be one of the pictures on my phone from last weekend of my daughter with her six-month-old. In fact, it dates from Tuscany c.1290, and the mother and child are the Virgin Mary and Christ. It’s a small painting, tempera on wood; it’s the opener of the National Gallery’s new blockbuster, Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350; and it’s there to make the show’s fundamental point, which is that its creator, the Sienese Duccio, introduced many of the painterly

Thursday

Matthew Parris

A trap for the right

On Thursday 16 August 1739, the young John Wesley met and for an hour argued with the middle-aged Bishop of Bristol, Joseph Butler. It was an ill-tempered encounter. Wesley believed that God communicated directly with individuals, invested his promises and purposes in them personally, and charged them with missions to reveal and explain the divine will. Butler, famous for his rationalism, reacted with cold indignation. ‘Sir,’ he told Wesley, ‘the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing.’ The Bishop spoke for England. We do not ‘do’ God – not even the 49 per cent of us who actually believe

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Are you Ramadan-ready?

‘Are you Ramadan-ready?’ That was the poster in Sainsbury’s advertising its delicious range of fast-breaking foods (rice was one). And the striking thing about it was… the ‘you’. That ‘you’ means the normal customer, the default Sainsbury’s shopper. Same with the email I got from the swanky Belgravia hair salon I used to visit: Here, we understand that Ramadan is a time of reflection, renewal and spiritual focus – and we also know how important it is to take a moment for yourself amid the busy days of fasting and prayer. That’s why we are delighted to announce that our salon will be open late during Ramadan, offering evening appointments

Tuesday

Damian Thompson

Conclave – what really happens when a Pope dies?

54 min listen

The film Conclave has picked up a host of awards across all the major ceremonies so far, including at the Screen Actors Guild, the Golden Globes, and winning Best Picture at the BAFTAs. Adapted from the novel by Robert Harris, it also has eight nominations at the upcoming 2025 Academy Awards. Full of intrigue, the film has viewers wondering how true to life the process depicted on the big screen is. And, with Pope Francis hospitalised, amidst the award season, this has only heightened interest in Papal conclaves and the election process.  Dr Kurt Martens, Professor of Canon Law at the Catholic University of America, joins Damian Thompson to unpack the process.

Thursday

Hugh Schofield

Why is there no campaign to free novelist Boualem Sansal?

Paris What possible crime has the award-winning novelist Boualem Sansal committed that merits being locked away for three months now by the Algerian police? Listen to the Algerian government – and its cheerleaders on social media – and theanswer appears to be that he is at best a stooge for the French far right, at worst an outright traitor. Friends of the man paint another picture: a gently spoken free-thinker with the courage to speak his mind. Sansal, who is 80 and suffers from cancer, was arrested at Algiers airport on 16 November as he got off a plane from Paris. He has been in an Algiers prison ever since,

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Why militant atheists don’t understand religion: a conversation with Alister McGrath

36 min listen

In his new book Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times, Prof Alister McGrath rejects the notion that belief is a relic of the past and takes aim at the ‘new atheists’ who attack religion without even knowing what it is. Prof McGrath, emeritus Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University, has had a unique journey to religion. A former Marxist atheist with a doctorate in molecular biology, he’s now a world-renowned theologian and Anglican priest.  In this lively discussion with Damian Thompson he talks about the boundary between science and religion, something poorly understood by aggressive atheists such as Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.

Friday

Damian Thompson

Are Syrian Christians who speak the language of Jesus about to disappear after 2,000 years?

26 min listen

There has been a Christian community in Syria since the first century AD. But it is shrinking fast and faces terrifying new threats as the country’s government, following the overthrow of President Assad, forges alliances with hardline Muslims including foreign jihadists – Uighurs from China, Uzbeks from Central Asia, Chechens from Russia, Afghans and Pakistanis. Mgr Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Anglican Bishop of Rochester who is now a Catholic priest of the Ordinariate, has written a heartbreaking piece for The Spectator about the Christians of Maaloula in southwest Syria. It’s one of the last remaining communities to speak Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ. ‘Were this community to

Thursday

Jonathan Sumption

For all its fame, the Great Siege of Malta made no difference to the course of history

Strategically located in the narrows of the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tripoli, with a fine natural harbour, Malta has attracted the attention of successive conquerors for two millennia: Phoenician, Carthaginian, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Norman, Aragonese, French and finally British. In 1565, the island was occupied by a power that was already beginning to look anachronistic: the Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem. The Hospitallers were an aristocratic order of monk-knights, founded at the end of the 11th century to shelter Christian pilgrims and defend the Holy Land during the brief period when it was part of the crusader kingdoms of the Levant. Since then, they had progressively

Tuesday

Franklin Nelson

This other Eden: Adam and Eve in Paradise, by Eça de Queirós, reviewed

When José Saramago denounced the Bible as a ‘catalogue of cruelties’ at the launch of his novel Cain in 2009, the response from the Catholic church in Portugal was fast and frosty. The country’s conference of bishops labelled his comments ‘offensive’, adding: ‘Insults do no one any good, particularly from a Nobel prizewinner.’ Saramago might have been taking his cue from the man he considered to be Portugal’s greatest novelist. While serving as a diplomat in Britain, Cuba and France, Eça de Queirós (1845-1900) savaged clerical hypocrisy and national backwardness in what are now considered canonical realist doorstoppers. And a century before Saramago, he caused a similar ruckus with Adam

Thursday

Rupert Shortt

We are all people of faith, whether we realise it or not

A.J. Ayer and other thinkers linked to the Vienna Circle famously contradicted themselves. A claim such as ‘all truths are scientific truths’ cannot itself be verified scientifically. So whether the assertion is true or false, it follows that there is at least one fact which isn’t a physical fact. Thus metaphysics buries its own undertakers. Yet Ayer’s ideas survive today in mutated form and influence other subjects besides philosophy. Though partly infected by relativism, the humanities have witnessed a growing impulse to redescribe everything in material and supposedly objective terms. The move is reductive. It involves restricting us to a world of causes rather than reasons, sounds rather than music.

Saturday

James MacMillan

James MacMillan, Sebastian Morello, Amy Wilentz, Sam Leith and Lloyd Evans

32 min listen

This week: composer James MacMillan reads his diary on the beautiful music of football (01:11); Sebastian Morello tells us about the deep connection between hunting and Christianity (07:17); Amy Wilentz explains how Vodou fuels Haiti’s gang culture (16:14); The Spectator’s literary editor Sam Leith reviews The Virago Book of Friendship (22:38); and – from the arts pages – The Spectator’s theatre critic Lloyd Evans writes about a new play on the last days of Liz Truss and also about Bette and Joan, which includes ‘brutal’ and ‘brilliant’ portraits of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (26:37). Presented by Oscar Edmondson. Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Oscar Edmondson.

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

The West’s right turn, Michael Gove interviews Jordan Peterson & the ADHD trap

45 min listen

This week: the fight for the future of the right From Milei in Argentina to Trump in the US, Meloni in Italy to the rise of the AfD in Germany, the world appears to be turning to the right, say James Kanagasooriam and Patrick Flynn. One country, however, seems to be the exception to this rule: our own. Britain under Keir Starmer appears to be putting on a revival of the old classic Socialism in One Country. However, beyond Westminster, the data show that Britain is not moving to the left in line with its government. While the Conservatives and Reform are locked in a near-constant struggle for supremacy, polling

Monday

Sebastian Morello

The Christian case for hunting

When I was a teenager, my closest friend, Henry, would vanish into the Shropshire Hills over the hunting season’s weekends. When he returned, it was with a wind-beaten face, wearing the traditional beagler’s white breeks and green socks, with a leather hunting whip slung over his shoulder. I knew nothing of this world, until one late autumnal Saturday he invited me to join him. As I watched the beagle pack race across the landscape, I realised I had stepped into a magical event, a hunting scene from a medieval tapestry brought to life. I was hooked. To this day, many sporting Christians throughout Europe honour St Hubert with songs and

Michael Gove

‘I’m a new kind of Christian’: Jordan Peterson on faith, family and the future of the right

Professor Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist, author and commentator whose latest book, We Who Wrestle with God, is about the psychological significance of Bible stories. He speaks to The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove about supernatural relationships, the folly of net zero and what’s next for Europe. ‘A lot of the atheist argument misses the mark because the God that’s being disbelieved is never defined’ MICHAEL GOVE: In your book, you work intimately with Bible stories to bring out their meaning, their relevance and their importance. Why should anyone read the Bible? JORDAN PETERSON: The simple answer is because you have to have your story straight or you go off

The Spectator

Letters: Where to find the best negroni

Free thinking Sir: Your leading article (‘Article of faith’, 14 December) appears to have forgotten the connection between rationalism and natural rights. Liberals indeed think in utilitarian, Rousseauian and what they consider ‘rationalistic’ terms. But what about the logic of natural rights that come from John Rawls or Robert Nozick? The Declaration of Independence, the political culmination of Enlightenment-era thought on reason and rights, was in large part the product of irreligious minds. This document has been the model for a free society for centuries. And what about Milton Friedman’s argument for a free society? That nobody can know with certainty what sin is; therefore, no one can coerce anybody

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

The case for ‘long Christmas’

There comes a time right after the new year when the retail sector decides it’s done with fairy lights and sparkles. Out goes the party food, the bao buns with Santa hats, the mixed platters of prosciutto and cheese, the gift sets of flavoured olive oil and the festive cheeseboards. On the discount rails there are scarlet jumpers with diamante and slinky party frocks, looking less and less inviting by the day. Back comes the sleek minimalism of the retail sector in its most pared down aspect as it flogs low-carb, low-calorie ready meals and fitness gear in time for the great ‘new year, new you’ personal transformation. Dry January,

Tuesday

Damian Thompson

Why was C.S. Lewis such a killjoy at Christmas? A discussion with Alister McGrath

27 min listen

Which 20th-century Scrooge had the following to say about the celebration of Christmas?  ‘It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure… Anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It’s almost blackmail… Can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers?’ Step forward C.S. Lewis, beloved Christian apologist and children’s author, whose splenetic denunciation of ‘the whole dreary business’ of Christmas and mean-spirited comments about carol singers are hard to reconcile with his reputation for benevolence. To make sense of the author’s views, Damian Thompson is

Saturday

Andrew Watts

Christmas II: Andrews Watts, Marcus Walker, Ali Kefford, Roger Lewis, Ayaan Hirsh Ali and Christopher Howse

48 min listen

On this week’s Christmas Out Loud – part two: Andrew Watts goes to santa school (1:11); Marcus Walker reads his priest’s notebook (7:20); Ali Kefford spends Christmas on patrol with submariners (12:34); Roger Lewis says good riddance to 2024, voiced by the actor Robert Bathurst (20:57); Ayaan Hirsh Ali argues that there is a Christian revival under way (32:41); and Christopher Howse reveals the weirdness behind Christmas carols (38:34).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.