Today

11 Nov 2021
The selfie is dead – but self-obsession is universal

In 2013 the Oxford English Dictionary named ‘selfie’ as the word of the year. Its use had increased by 17,000 per cent in just 12 months, the OED revealed. Before long a cottage industry of feminist scholars sprang up, dedicated to producing gruesome waffle on the subject. A paper by Emma Renold of Cardiff University and Jessica Ringrose of University College London, for example, was entitled ‘Selfies, relfies and phallic tagging: post-human participations [sic] in teen digital sexuality assemblages’. Not to be outdone, Katie Warfield of Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Canada, wrote ‘MirrorCamera-Room: the gendered multi-(in)stabilities of the selfie’. Dr Terri Senft of New York University founded an international Selfie Researchers Network to study ‘the politics and aesthetics of selfie culture’.

The selfie is dead – but self-obsession is universal

Friday

29 Oct 2021
Holy Smoke
Did a ‘mafia’ of liberal cardinals pressure Benedict to resign?
30 min listen

In this episode of Holy Smoke, I interview Julia Meloni, author of The St Gallen Mafia: Exposing the Secret Reformist Group Within the Church. It's the first detailed study of the self-described 'mafia' of liberal cardinals who worked tirelessly to prevent and then undermine the pontificate of Benedict XVI. The book contains many disconcerting revelations, and also well-sourced speculation that the group's founder, the Jesuit scholar Cardinal Martini of Milan, may have visited Benedict shortly before his own death in order to pressure him to resign. By 2013, when that happened, Martini was dead, but he had given his blessing to a St Gallen candidate: his fellow Jesuit Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, whose initiatives as pope – and particularly the vicious attempt to suppress the Traditional Latin Mass – coincide very closely with Martini's own agenda.

Did a ‘mafia’ of liberal cardinals pressure Benedict to resign?

Saturday

16 Oct 2021
Is the Pope a Protestant?

When Pope Francis was asked last month how he was doing after surgery on his colon in July, he replied: ‘Still alive, even though some people wanted me to die. I know there were even meetings between prelates who thought the Pope’s condition was more serious than the official version. They were preparing for the conclave. Patience!’ It was such a ferocious outburst that few people realised that Francis was talking about two separate things. He’s 84, which is old even for a pope. The medical reports said that he didn’t have cancer, but he did stay in hospital longer than expected and Italian doctors don’t have a great track record of telling the truth about an elderly pontiff’s state of health. There’s no obvious front-runner to succeed Francis, and his policy of creating cardinals from ‘the peripheries’ (e.

Is the Pope a Protestant?

Thursday

14 Oct 2021
Ex Anglican Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali converts to Catholicism

Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester and one of the best-known Anglican clerics, could be ordained as a Catholic priest as early as next month. The conversion of such a high-profile intellectual would be an enormous boost for the Catholic Ordinariate, set up by Pope Benedict XVI to receive Anglicans into the Roman church. Friends of Nazir-Ali say that he has already converted and is now a member of the Ordinariate which over the years has seen several Anglican clergy, many of them married, serve as Catholic priests. Its services are distinctively Anglican in style and include passages from the Book of Common Prayer. Pakistan-born Nazir-Ali, 72, was Bishop of Rochester from 1994 until 2009, when he resigned his post to set up a centre in Oxford dedicated to promoting orthodox evangelism and dialogue with other faiths.

Ex Anglican Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali converts to Catholicism

Monday

11 Oct 2021

Thursday

30 Sep 2021
The best recordings of the Goldberg Variations

I sometimes think the classical record industry would collapse if it weren’t for the Goldberg Variations. Every month brings more recordings of Bach’s monumental, compact and rhapsodic keyboard masterpiece. And that’s impressive, given that nowhere else does the composer demand such sustained technical brilliance from the performer, who must execute dizzying scales and trills that wouldn’t sound out of place in one of Liszt’s fantasies. If the Goldberg Variations are an ordeal for harpsichordists, they’re a bloody nightmare for pianists, because they have to tackle music written for two manuals on just one. Their fingers tumble perilously over each other; it looks a bit like high-speed knitting. When the 22-year-old Canadian prodigy Glenn Gould — already dosed up on the barbiturates that would shorten his life —shuffled into Columbia’s studios to record the Goldbergs in 1955, there wasn’t a single piano performance in the catalogue.

The best recordings of the Goldberg Variations

Friday

17 Sep 2021
Holy Smoke
Has Pope Francis just thrown Joe Biden under the bus on abortion?
18 min listen

Say what you like about Pope Francis, but he's incapable of giving a boring in-flight interview. On Wednesday, coming back from Hungary and Slovakia, he was asked about the problem of pro-abortion Catholic politicians receiving Holy Communion. He immediately launched into a ferocious denunciation of abortion, describing it as homicide, saying there was no middle way and stating that support for abortion was grounds for 'excommunication'. Francis then slightly qualified this by explaining that these 'excommunicated' Catholics needed to be lovingly shown the error of their ways, but it was hard to escape the obvious conclusion. The Pope regards the President as barred from Communion – which drives a horse and cart through the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy of Biden's own bishop, Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington.

Has Pope Francis just thrown Joe Biden under the bus on abortion?

Thursday

2 Sep 2021
Technology is robbing us of the power to forget

Two years ago, Lauren Goode, a senior writer at Wired magazine, cancelled her wedding and it was awkward. These things always are, but you get over it because the brain slowly learns how to skip over painful memories. Or it did, before social media. Goode has made a career out of wittily stripping away the pretensions of consumer tech, and when her wedding plans blew up consumer tech had its revenge. She ended her eight-year relationship in 2019 — but the internet didn’t get the message and kept confronting her with ‘a cyborg version of me, a digital ghost, that is still getting married’. As she wrote in Wired, at the beginning of this year her social media feed was still cluttered with wedding ads, ‘a near-daily collage of wedding paraphernalia’ from the image-sharing platform Pinterest, plus reminders of the fiasco vomited up by the wretched ‘Memories’ feature on photo apps.

Technology is robbing us of the power to forget

Friday

27 Aug 2021
Holy Smoke
Joe Biden and the betrayal of religious freedom
26 min listen

Religious freedom is already being mercilessly attacked in Taliban-run Afghanistan: Muslim women in particular face a living hell unless they're happy to submit to their new rulers' psychotic brand of Sharia. The United States is required by its own laws to do everything it can to champion religious liberty around the world. But Afghan's moderate Muslims, China's Uighurs, Myanmar's Rohynga and Christians in dozens of countries would be foolish to trust President Joe Biden, whose administration can't wait to dismantle the First Amendment Rights of conservative Christians back home. My guest is Andrea Picciotti-Bayer of the Washington-based Conscience Project, which speaks up for people of faith who commit the thought crime of not subscribing to liberal gender ideology.

Joe Biden and the betrayal of religious freedom

Friday

13 Aug 2021
Holy Smoke
Is the Catholic Church falling apart?
18 min listen

In the last episode of Holy Smoke, I discussed Pope Francis's brutal and petty new document which seeks to ban as many Latin Masses as possible. This week we look at the other recent developments, which are arguably just as disturbing: two criminal prosecutions in which close allies of the Pope are accused of a range of hair-raising offences – and the question of how much Francis knew about their activities still hasn't been answered, either by the Vatican or its tame press corps.. Also, I touch on a new explanation for Rome's dreadful pact with China. Did the Pope's Secretary of State sign away the freedom of Chinese Catholics because Beijing was threatening to release data relating to the use of the gay hook-up app Grindr inside the walls of the Vatican? We may never find out.

Is the Catholic Church falling apart?

Thursday

29 Jul 2021
Why am I so angry?

Last week, walking into a branch of Waterstones in south London, I made way (or so I thought) for a pixie-faced man in Lycra who was theatrically hauling his bike into the shop. It seemed a bit of a liberty, but these days cyclists are godly folk who can do anything they like, especially in the eco-obsessed puritan commonwealths south of the river. Then a querulous voice piped up behind me. ‘Excuse me! You just pushed past me and my bike.’ I think it was the ‘and my bike’ that did it. Pixie Face headed for Waterstones’ mandatory display of anti-racist memoirs, bleating about ‘manners’ while caressing his affronted vehicle. And I went off on one, as I always do in these situations. ‘Look, mate, you’ve got mental health issues,’ I said.

Why am I so angry?

Thursday

22 Jul 2021
Playing with fire — did QAnon start as a cynical game?

On Easter Monday 2018, Donald and Melania Trump stood on the balcony of the White House next to a giant bunny. It’s part of the job: since 1878, presidents have hosted a children’s Easter egg hunt on the south lawn. Usually they rhapsodise abut what fun the kids are going to have. Trump, true to form, told his young guests to ‘just think of 700 billion dollars, because that’s all going into our military this year’. And he also said that the White House was an amazing place, in ‘tip-top shape’. The liberal media rolled their eyes about Trump boasting to children about military spending but quickly moved on. The fools! They’d just missed the biggest story since 9/11. The President of the United States had confirmed the existence of an international cabal of child-trafficking psychopaths including Hillary Clinton, George Soros, George W.

Playing with fire — did QAnon start as a cynical game?

Sunday

18 Jul 2021
Holy Smoke
The plot against the Old Rite
13 min listen

Traditionalist Catholics are still reeling from the Pope's imposition of ferocious new rules limiting the celebration of the old Latin Mass. On Friday, he tore up Summorum Pontificum, Benedict XVI's document rehabilitating the pre-Vatican II ceremonies — and he did so while his predecessor was still alive. Francis's replacement, Traditionis Custodes, and the letter that accompanies it, relegate Latin Mass Catholics to that of second-class citizens. Their priests must now seek permission from their bishops before using the Old Rite. My colleague Tim Stanley aptly describes it as a reactionary move worthy of Brezhnev, one that ostensibly promotes unity while actually pushing traditionalists towards schism. It's a shocking development, and the subject of today's Holy Smoke podcast, which asks how traditionalists should respond to what amounts to a poison-pen letter from the pontiff.

The plot against the Old Rite

Tuesday

29 Jun 2021
Holy Smoke
The tyranny of bad hymns
25 min listen

Christian music lovers of all denominations – Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, whatever – know only too well that they enter their local churches at their peril. In this week's episode I talk to the irrepressible Lois Letts, a wedding and funeral organist for C of E churches in rural Herefordshire, about bad hymns. The funerals are appropriate, since when I first met Lois she wrote obituaries for the Times. Pity the wet vicar who tries to force her to play a bad hymn! We don't mince our words: our discussion is a euphemism-free zone and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. And there's a musical coda, a treat in store for those many Holy Smoke listeners who are devoted to the memory of Dame Clara Butt.

The tyranny of bad hymns

Tuesday

22 Jun 2021
Why do footballers equate health with virtue?

Last Tuesday, the great footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, captain of Portugal, removed two bottles of Coca-Cola from a table in front of him, and tens of millions of pounds of sponsorship money went down the plughole. Ronaldo was at a press conference for the Euro 2021 Championship, in which Coca-Cola had invested heavily – and, as it turned out, pointlessly. It took Ronaldo just seven seconds to make his point: that regular Coca-Cola is stuffed with sugar and if you drink too much of it, or any sugary soft drink, you'd better book an appointment at the diabetes clinic now. Having hidden the fizzy drinks, Ronaldo held up a bottle of water to indicate what his fans should be drinking instead. As it happens, that brand of water is also owned by Coke, but I don't think the company will find that consoling.

Why do footballers equate health with virtue?

Wednesday

9 Jun 2021
Holy Smoke
The Christian mental health crisis
34 min listen

Is the mental health of Christians beginning to collapse under the strain not just of Covid and its effect on worship but also the bottomless contempt of progressive ideology for religious belief? This week's Holy Smoke is a conversation with theologian Dr Gavin Ashenden about a crisis of morale that is robbing some Christians of the will to live. One former churchgoer told me last week that he'd be perfectly happy not to wake up the next morning – and I knew exactly how he felt. But in conclusion Gavin suggests a way of breaking out of this existential nightmare. So, as they say on the BBC, if you're affected by any of the issues raised in this programme, make sure to listen through to the end.

The Christian mental health crisis

Friday

28 May 2021
Holy Smoke
How Biden’s cardinals are trying to shut down free discussion
16 min listen

America's Catholic bishops are furiously divided among themselves this week, after a liberal faction led by the Biden loyalists Cardinals Cupich of Chicago and Wilton Gregory of Washington tried to stop them discussing the question of whether the radically pro-choice president of the United States should be allowed to receive Holy Communion.The US conference of bishops is scheduled to address the whole question of the Eucharist at its meeting next month. The plan is to prepare a document that will finally decide whether American bishops will enforce the Vatican's ban on actively pro-abortion Catholics receiving the sacrament while in a state of 'grave sin', as the Church puts it.As I say in the new episode of Holy Smoke, It looks as if most of the 290 active bishops are ready to enforce such a ban – goaded by Joe Biden's increasingly hardline support for completely unrestricted abortions, and his plans to remove constitutional protection for pro-life public employees.

How Biden’s cardinals are trying to shut down free discussion

Thursday

13 May 2021
Holy Smoke
Why the legal harassment of today’s Christians is the last legacy of the Soviet Union
33 min listen

Today’s Holy Smoke podcast is about the increasingly brutal bullying and silencing of people – especially Christians – who hold the ‘wrong’ opinions on controversial topics. A culture of censorship is becoming ever more deeply embedded in public institutions not just in Britain but also throughout Europe. In London last month we witnessed the nasty spectacle of John Sherwood, a 71-year-old Christian pastor, being dragged off the street and surrounded by policeman for public preaching against gay marriage. In Finland, former interior minister Päivi Räsänen, an Evangelical Lutheran, faces a jail sentence because she tweeted out the same view. The authorities took offence, rooted through all her previous statements on Christian topics with Stasi-like zeal and found further evidence of ‘hate speech’ – so those have been added to the charge sheet.

Why the legal harassment of today’s Christians is the last legacy of the Soviet Union

Monday

3 May 2021
Holy Smoke
The magical power of charisma – and why the Churches are ignoring it
38 min listen

The subject of this week’s Holy Smoke is charisma, which you might think is one of the most hackneyed and devalued words in the language; only the other day I saw an advert for a ‘charismatic chartered accountant’. But its popularity is no accident. ‘Charisma’ is shorthand for one of the most revolutionary – and useful – concepts in intellectual history. Charisma refers to the personal magnetism that binds a leader to his or her followers. Our modern understanding of it is based on an idea, almost a revelation, by the great German social theorist Max Weber, who believed that the display of ‘extraordinary powers’ was one of the driving forces of history. Those powers didn't have to be supernatural. They didn't even have to be demonstrably real, in the sense that they could be measured or proved to exist.

The magical power of charisma – and why the Churches are ignoring it

Monday

12 Apr 2021

Wednesday

7 Apr 2021
Holy Smoke
What the police disruption of a Polish church tells us about post-Christian Britain
35 min listen

The intrusion of the sanctuary of a Polish church in Balham on Good Friday by the Metropolitan police was not only a shocking event but also a deeply concerning piece of history. It can't be interpreted as a premeditated attack on Christianity – but it's evidence of the utter irrelevance of Britain's Christian heritage to the culture of liberal bureaucracy that is fast replacing it.In this week’s Holy Smoke episode, Dr Gavin Ashendon and I talk about the blundering insensitivity of the police officer who marched into the sanctuary of Christ the King Church during the veneration of the Cross without apparently understanding anything of what the ceremony signified. This happened at a service in Balham, South West London last night.

What the police disruption of a Polish church tells us about post-Christian Britain

Thursday

1 Apr 2021
The troubling history of Mormonism

The new three-part Netflix series Murder Among the Mormons is attracting big audiences, and deservedly so. Finally someone has made a major documentary about Mark Hofmann, the squeaky-voiced Mormon nerd who was both the most brilliant document-forger in history and a psychopathic murderer. In the early 1980s, the young Hofmann manufactured a series of documents that portrayed its prophet Joseph Smith — the discoverer of the ‘gold plates’ that supposedly described a great Israelite civilisation in America — as a conman up to his ears in the occult. In 1985, panicking that he was about to be discovered, he blew up two Mormons with pipe bombs, was caught by police and is serving life in jail. Murder Among the Mormons is gripping stuff if you don’t know the story.

The troubling history of Mormonism

Thursday

25 Mar 2021
Holy Smoke
The mystery of Pope Francis’s infallibly good taste in classical music
34 min listen

In this week's Holy Smoke podcast I suggest that Pope Francis has a more profound appreciation of classical music than any of his predecessors. I've been saying this for years and everyone assumes that it’s a wind-up or that I'm confusing him with Benedict XVI. Not so. The Pope doesn't just enjoy listening to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner: he has strong views on the best recordings of their work, and very sound views they are too. You'll have to listen to the podcast to hear the details, but here's a taster: Francis not only recognises Wilhelm Furtwängler as the supreme interpreter of Wagner's Ring cycle, but he asserts the superiority of the live 1950 La Scala recordings to those taped for Italian radio in 1953.

The mystery of Pope Francis’s infallibly good taste in classical music

Wednesday

10 Mar 2021
Holy Smoke
Is Jordan Peterson about to move from Jung to Jesus?
44 min listen

Is Dr Jordan Peterson about to convert to Christianity? If so, it’s a big deal. The earnest but sardonic Canadian psychologist is already the most effective advocate for the moral precepts of Christianity in the English-speaking media. But, until now, his penetrating exposition of the Bible has been inspired more by Jungian symbolism than by actual religious belief. That may be about to change, albeit not in the happiest of circumstances. In recent months Peterson has suffered from a combination of medical conditions that have left him in wretched pain, both physical and psychological. This has left him wondering whether it’s time to submit to the dogmatic assertions of orthodox Christianity. He explains his complex reasoning in an extraordinary podcast, in which he presents himself to his friend Jonathan Pageau, an Eastern Orthodox Christian, as something close to a broken man.

Is Jordan Peterson about to move from Jung to Jesus?
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