Religion

Britain without blasphemy laws is a surprisingly recent development. Blasphemy was abolished as a common law offence in England and Wales only in 2008 and in Scotland in 2021. But that was the final burial of a law dead for much longer. The last execution for the crime was in 1697; the last imprisonment in 1921; and the last successful trial in 1977 – Mary Whitehouse’s prosecution of Gay News for publishing a poem about a centurion’s rape of Christ’s corpse. Even if 11 local councils banned Monty Python’s Life of Brian two years later, the trend since has been towards trusting that the Almighty is big enough to fend

Assisi In a medieval church built of white stone, pilgrims and tourists shuffle past the body of a 15-year-old boy in a tomb with a glass side. The boy is handsome, with dark curly hair, and wears a blue tracksuit top, jeans and Nike trainers. Everyone peers through the glass and some realise, with a start, that the perfectly preserved face and hands are eerily lifelike silicone. The real remains, decomposing for almost 20 years, are inside the effigy. This is Carlo Acutis, the Italian teenager known as ‘God’s influencer’, who is about to become the first millennial saint of the Roman Catholic Church. The tomb is held up from

I wasn’t brought up in the faith. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist lay-preacher, but when my mother left County Durham for marriage in south-west Scotland, she left the religion of her childhood behind. My Scottish father’s experience of church gave him an odd penchant for the electric organ, but that was about it. So when, at the age of 12, I screwed up my courage and came out as a Christian, Dad put his hand on my shoulder – for the only time – and said: ‘It’s OK, son; it’s just a phase.’ Now, as my Christian phase approaches its seventh decade, I find myself looking back and wondering

I am a priest in the high church tradition of the Church of England. The technical term is Anglo-Catholicism, but I come from a very different Christian background. My heritage is non-conformist evangelical – I was baptised in a swimming pool in the summer of my first year of university. St James’s in Piccadilly hosts events featuring ‘icons’ from RuPaul’s Drag Race UK It’s a long story as to how I’ve ended up wearing a chasuble and celebrating ‘Mass’, but a big part of it has been to do with church architecture. After several years in the charismatic evangelical scene, I became fascinated with the beauty of medieval churches, particularly

Blood on our hands Sir: Paul Wood asks if anyone will be punished for the bloodbath in Syria (‘Massacre of the innocents’, 15 March). But where does one start? What we have seen most recently are the dreadful consequences – as also in Iraq and Afghanistan – of selfish western meddling in the Middle East for our own ends. I was on sabbatical in Syria at the end of 2010 interviewing Syrians of all religions and political persuasions. Well over 90 per cent and especially women saw the Assads as the only plausible bulwark against an Islamist theocratic nightmare. There was freedom of religion, freedom of association, the freedom for

For a politician known for his ability to shock, Donald Trump managed to outdo himself with his baseless claim during last year’s presidential debate that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing, butchering and eating household pets. Regardless of this racist lie – new Haitian immigrants to Ohio do not eat people’s pets and are in the main perfectly respectable – Haiti itself is a mess and a good place to flee. The country’s extreme problems can’t be denied, although the US is doing a good job of ignoring them. Dictators assume guilt by association: if one old person is against you, they may all be killed Since the devastating