The BBC Trust's censure of John Humphrys over his welfare documentary reveals much about the corporation..... Rude words, not honest opinions, are welcome at the BBC. Today, the BBC couldn’t give two hoots about Bible-bashing (though it would draw the line at Koran-kicking). But it does want to censor a different kind of blasphemy: any opinion that opposes the liberal consensus.
To gauge a sense of how prevalent a culture of pornography has become in the United Kingdom, we need only reflect on David Cameron's decision to 'soften' his tone in the debate about how far Government can go to regulate online pornography.
Pope Francis said recently that everyone – atheists included – is redeemed by Christ’s blood. His words confirmed the thoughts of a convert to Catholicism who agonised over the question following the death of her atheist father.
This is the full text of a homily for teachers, headteachers and educators at St Andrew’s Cathedral, Glasgow, on June 14 by Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Discovering a strategy for driving incompetence out of the Church. In societies run by religious leaders there’s only one way to do things and that is according to the book, whichever book might be invoked. This also applies to the totalitarian politics that keep Communist parties in power in several Asian countries.
Haste is our enemy. It puts us under stress, raises our blood pressure, makes us impatient, renders us more vulnerable to accidents and, most seriously of all, blinds us to the needs of others. Haste is normally not a virtue, irrespective of the goodness of the thing towards which we are hurrying.
Poles should run everything here. The latest issue of The Economist included a small story in its Britain section about My Medik, a low-cost, private GP clinic run by Poles. The clinic opened four years ago and has 30,000 patients on its rolls. Polish immigrants were fed up with NHS GPs who only gave them brief consultations and seldom worked 24/7.
In a marvelous little book entitled, The Music of Silence, David Steindl-Rast highlights how each hour of the day has its own special light and its own particular mood and how we are more attentive to the present moment when we recognize and honor these "special angels" lurking inside each hour.
Recently an op-ed piece appeared in the New York Times by Frank Bruni, entitled, The Wages of Celibacy. The column, while provocative, is fair. Mostly he asks a lot of hard, necessary questions.
Twenty-five years ago, I wrote a column entitled, Guidelines for the Long Haul. Revisiting it recently, I was encouraged that my principles haven't swayed during the past quarter-century, only taken on more nuance. I still recommend those same commandments, nostalgically revisited, somewhat redacted, but fully re-endorsed:
We live in a highly secularized culture. Generally this draws one of three reactions from Christians struggling to live out faith in this context: First, a growing number of Christians of all denominations see secularity more as an enemy of faith and the churches than as an ally.
When Mrs Thatcher came to power I was a local politician, a member of Sheffield City Council. David Blunkett became leader and I was his deputy and chair of the finance committee. It was a bleak time for northern cities like Sheffield. On the one hand, the economic base of the city was collapsing.
Right opposite Harrods last Saturday, an old woman sat on the pavement moaning for money. In her many tattered layers and hoods, she looked like a big, swaddled baby. Click, click, click went the heels around her. Louis Vuitton and Harvey Nichols bags swept past her face and nobody could be bothered to stop, take out a coin, bend down and hand it to her. By now someone will have swept her off that space – such an eyesore for tourists.
The symbol of the Cross is ubiquitous in our society. It is printed on bumper stickers and tattooed on forearms; it is spray-painted on concrete walls and stitched onto denim jackets. Will this symbol continue to devolve into a mere fashion statement, a cultural icon, or a religious trademark? There is a need to reclaim the true meaning of the cross and understand that it is something much more
How do we lift our darkest, most depressed, most lonely moments up to God? How can we pray when we are most deeply alone, helpless, and our whole world seems to be collapsing?
The outpouring of public grief over the death of Diana Princess of Wales marked the moment England returned to its Roman Catholic roots almost 500 years after the reformation, according to the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales.
« God, grant us a Pope who is holy, wise, competent, and strong". La Stampa has collected some comments from influential women on the conclave, and on what they’d like to see during the new papacy.
Pope Benedict XVI's resignation - the first by a Pope for more than 600 years - is forcing the Vatican to consider some unusual questions. Here are 10 answers.
