Church

My church attendance leaves something to be desired and I can’t cite Bible verses for every occasion. Yet for as long as I can remember, I have been a staunch supporter of the Christian church. But while I’m always willing to speak up for the church, it is not always willing to defend itself. Iceland became a Christian country over a thousand years ago. Here, as in other Western countries, the teachings of Christianity and the work of the church have been enormously influential in shaping our societies. Yet all too often nowadays, the church in Western societies is silent on the issues that matter. All too often, it fails to

Over the weekend, more than a hundred religious figures from across the different faiths launched a legal challenge against the ban on communal worship in England. They claim the Covid restrictions are a violation of their basic human right to freedom of religious expression. Leaders from the Anglican and Catholic churches, as well as the Muslim Council of Britain, are in agreement on how unfair they view the ban. It’s difficult to think of a cogent argument against their position.  For background, I am an atheist. Raised in a Catholic family, I never truly believed, even as a small child. Atheism has been something that has been with me throughout my whole

From time to time, every industry must adapt to some inconvenient technological advance. Suddenly, some part of what you offer can be reproduced or distributed in a new form. The temptation is to ignore the issue and hope it goes away. But if you don’t act, eventually some competitor, existing or new, surely will. Reinvention is a painful process. Hollywood’s reaction to the advent of television followed the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. The same emotions played out in the response of the music industry to the arrival of digital downloads and streaming. Churches will have noticed that online congregations are larger than physical ones In

On Saturday evening, Christians will prepare for an Easter unlike any other. With every church closed, from St Paul’s Cathedral to the meanest country chapel, Anglican worshippers will be directed to a website where lay leaders, priests and bishops will hold a ‘virtual vigil’ ending at dawn on Easter Sunday. In Westminster Cathedral, the mother church of Catholics in England and Wales, a deacon will sing the great Easter proclamation known as the Exsultet. But this year, when the final syllable dies away, he will look out into the nave and see row upon row of vacant seats. It’s faith, but without the faithful. It’s happening the world over. This

Corona mysteries Sir: John Lee highlights the issue of dying of seasonal flu vs dying of coronavirus when assessing attributable deaths (‘The corona puzzle’, 28 March). The obvious solution would be a high autopsy rate. However, autopsies on known or suspected coronavirus deaths are not being done in case they lead to mortuary technologists and pathologists becoming infected. (Tuberculosis, HIV and even rabies infections are easier to prevent in mortuary work than coronavirus.) This contributes to a lack of information about how coronavirus affects people. In the long term, it also seems unlikely that anatomical examination of the dead will revert to its pre-coronavirus autopsy rate of 17 per cent

‘Lourdes shrine closes healing pools as precaution against coronavirus,’ says a discouraging headline in the Catholic Herald. Jesus ‘made the lame to run’ and ‘gave the blind their sight’, but Christians are not like Jesus, however much they may try to imitate him. We lack miraculous powers; and so, in matters of life and death (though not of the afterlife), we must defer to the civil power. On Tuesday, our neighbour rang for my wife, who is a churchwarden, and asked: ‘Shall I open the church as usual this morning?’ After some rummaging on the diocesan website, she found that the answer, following Boris Johnson’s broadcast the night before, was

Q. I am arranging the seating plan for my daughter’s wedding and have a problem with one of her guests who is notorious for swapping her place to insert herself between ‘better’ people and thus disrupting the whole scheme. There will be 20 tables of eight at the dinner and I will be too busy to keep an eye on her. What do you suggest, Mary? — Name and address withheld A. You can outwit this disruptor by substituting a pseudonym, say Harriet Belafonte, for her own name on the grand plan at the door. Her name will not appear and so she won’t know which place name to swap.