Christianity

For non-Catholics, the most luridly fascinating aspect of Catholicism is confession. Telling your inmost sins — and we know what they are — to a male cleric, eh? In a darkened booth. How medieval is that? Well, the fantasies that people who never go to confession nurse about it are about to be shored up by a new book on the subject by the Catholic author John Cornwell. It’s called The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession. On the cover is a scary-looking picture of a confessional — not somewhere you’d take the children, frankly, but right at home in a Hitchcock movie. John Cornwell is a friend, and

The thing that most surprised me about Scarlett Johansson being asked to cut ties with an Israeli company she was brand ambassador for was that the company in question was Soda Stream. Soda Stream? Does she also work for Betamax and the Atari ST? I had no idea people still drank this 1980s icon, let alone that it was caught up in the world’s most interminably boring debate. For Israelis and Palestinians the quest to find a peaceful settlement in this tiny piece of land, only 1.2 Waleses in size, is a matter of life and death. For foreigners active in the conflict on one side or the other it is

‘Did Israel spoil Christmas again?’ I only ask because the claim that they did is becoming a modern tradition in Britain. The softest and most commonplace expression of the claim comes from those vicars or congregation members who claim that they find it ‘hard’ to sing ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ nowadays because of how dreadful the situation in Bethlehem is today compared with how little, still and dreamlessly sleepy it was back in Jesus’s time. This Christmas I had already attended one church which perpetuated this new conceit. And earlier this week I went to the church of St James in Piccadilly, which has made anti-Israeli propaganda its signature dish

As Christmas Day breaks over Maaloula, one of the last few villages which still speaks the language of Christ, Islamist fighters will patrol the streets. Whether the nuns of its ancient convent are safe depends on who you believe, President Assad or Al Qaeda. The local shrine of St Thecla was built in the cleft of a miraculous rock: there’s a grim irony in the knowledge that the nuns of St Thecla will spend Christmas Day caught between a rock and a very hard place. That’s why Saturday’s intervention by the shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, is important. Alexander, like the Prince of Wales, wants the UK to do more

I’d just like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to our heir to the throne, Prince Charles, for, as he put it, spending ‘twenty years’ trying to ‘build bridges between Islam and Christianity and (to) dispel ignorance and misunderstanding.’ Sadly, he has concluded that this noble endeavour was in vain and that Christians are being persecuted right, left and centre (or indeed wherever they are unfortunate enough to live in Muslim countries). Still, how kind of him to have tried. The thought of Prince Charles dispelling ignorance on any topic, let alone this one, is a captivating one. He seems to have gone about this particular

The Silence of Our Friends, my Amazon Singles ebook about the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, is published today. I know I’ve written several posts on this subject recently, so I promise to stop, so long as everyone buys the book. Otherwise I won’t. Ever. It’s a subject that has become ever more urgent this year with violence against Christians in Syria, where Islamists have been engaged in ‘religious cleansing’, and in Egypt, which saw the worst anti-Christian violence in centuries. Over the weekend the leading Catholic in Iraq, Patriarch Louis Sako, was in Rome where he lamented the west’s apathy, after a decade in which 1,000 Iraqi

The Church of England is doomed, Lord Carey has said, warning that Anglicanism is just ‘one generation away from extinction’. To be fair people have been saying this for a long time; in the mid-19th century the Church decided to make a survey of churchgoing, and were stunned to find out that only a quarter of people in England attended Anglican services and a similar number to non-Conformist services. Half the population wasn’t going at all. Now you’d be lucky to get that many at Christmas. The Church faces the same problem as all churches, namely that religious belief continues to decline across Europe, and that those religions that do

Imagine if correspondents in late 1944 had reported the Battle of the Bulge, but without explaining that it was a turning point in the second world war. Or what if finance reporters had told the story of the AIG meltdown in 2008 without adding that it raised questions about derivatives and sub-prime mortgages that could augur a vast financial implosion? Most people would say that journalists had failed to provide the proper context to understand the news. Yet that’s routinely what media outlets do when it comes to outbreaks of anti-Christian persecution around the world, which is why the global war on Christians remains the greatest story never told of

Freedom of speech is alive and well in Scotland, then. Pastor Josh Williamson took the Christian gospel to the streets of Perth last week, before he was arrested by the old bill for a ‘breach of the peace’. Asked why he was being arrested, Plod No 1 said because you’re too loud, pointing to the electrical device the clergyman was carrying. That’s an MP3 recorder, he replied, it’s not an amplifier. Then Plod No 2 claimed it was the content of his sermon, although he could not put his finger on what it was exactly. Hauled down the nick, refused the right of a lawyer, Williamson was eventually released with

‘You owe me an apology,’ Richard Dawkins informs me. It is a bright Oxford morning and we are sitting in his home. His wife has just made me coffee and I have met their new puppies. I am here to discuss a new book of his, but he is smarting from a disobliging reference to him in a recent one of mine. That, and an earlier encounter I wrote about here, have clearly rankled. I try a very limited apology. But it does strike me that Dawkins is more easily bruised than one might have imagined. I wonder if it has anything to do with the deluge of criticism he