Easter

Saturday

Julie Bindel

Ozempic has ruined Easter

From our UK edition

It’s a funny thing, being a feminist surrounded by women on weight-loss drugs. As someone who recognises the health risks of being clinically obese, I’ve never been a fat liberationist – but pretty much all of us used to be against prescribed beauty standards. In practice this meant we would critique the harmful impacts of the ‘size zero’ or ‘heroin chic’ trends rather than obsess over having gained a few pounds over Christmas. Yet, with the rise of weight-loss jabs, skinniness has become a norm rather than a feminist discussion. And twee ideas about ‘being good’ or ‘cheating’ have been replaced by – well – feeling too nauseous to cheat at all.  Which is why Easter is a fascinating holiday in this era of weight-loss jabs.

Friday

Druin Burch

What the death of my beloved son taught me about Easter

The hawthorn hedges are white with blossom; the countryside looks set for a wedding. Even in the small garden of my hospital, spring is inescapable. Cherry and magnolia bloom. Viburnum scents the air, young leaves come to the trees. Hospitals are where most lives begin, and where many end. Hospices shepherd only a small minority of deaths, about one in 20, often those of the middle aged whose diseases are more predictable. Frailty is less orderly, and the fitful hazards of age bring many to the general wards where I work. More of us die in hospital than anywhere else. What sort of spring wakes the hedgerows and the weeds, but not my boy? In the Emergency Department I met the woman who became my wife.

easter

Tuesday

Madeline Grant

Religion has been resurrected in British politics

From our UK edition

British history is littered with elections and Elections. The first type, common or garden elections, are fought with prosaic issues at their core. Readers might remember the 2001 general election, which saw such pressing topics as the fate of Kidderminster hospital pushed to the fore. The 1865 general election was also considered uneventful by contemporaries. Even contests nominally involving major changes can be just ‘elections’. The tedium of 2024, featuring cynical electoral bribery, with the result a foregone conclusion and the stated policy platforms of the two main parties largely similar, is a prime example. What, then, are the other type: the Elections?

Charles Moore

The Christian grace of Jimmy Lai’s prison drawings

From our UK edition

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that Peter Brookes’s fox, who normally tops this column, is absent. They can be reassured. He has gone to ground but will be (in hunting parlance) ‘bolted’ in time to return for future issues. I decided to remove the fox for Holy Week because the replacement drawing tells a story. It is by Jimmy Lai, the billionaire former boss of Apple Daily in Hong Kong. He drew it in solitary confinement in Stanley prison. He has now been incarcerated for nearly 2,000 days. This February, he was sentenced to a further 20 years for ‘conspiracy to collude with foreign forces’ and ‘to publish seditious materials’.

Stephen Daisley

Israel needs to rethink its relationship with Christians

Sometimes it’s a wonder Israel can stand with all the self-inflicted gunshot wounds in its feet. Israeli police placed their country in the eye of a diplomatic and religious storm by accosting their most senior Catholic clergymen as they made their way to pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Religious gatherings have been restricted during the ongoing war with Iran, which has repeatedly targeted built-up civilian areas including Jerusalem. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Father Francesco Ielpo, Custos of the Holy Land, were prevented from accessing the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday, the day when Christians mark Jesus Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.

Thursday

Robert F. Moss

The case for barbecuing ham

Easter is fast approaching, so of course I’m thinking about ham. This iconic centerpiece of the Easter dinner table isn’t usually associated with the barbecue pit – at least not anymore – but it’s time that changed. Ham and barbecue have had a long and somewhat rocky relationship. Both have smoky roots in the early American colonies – especially Virginia – but they originated separately. Europeans had a long tradition of salting and air-curing hams, but that method proved insufficient for preserving pork in the hot, humid climate of the New World. The Virginia colonists started rubbing their hams with brown sugar and salt and hanging them for weeks in smokehouses instead of out in the open air.

Gage Klipper

How different is Catholic and Protestant food at Easter?

I’m a New York-raised Italian Catholic, and my family’s inherited religious-cultural neuroses inform our meals every bit as much as the WASPs next door. This is particularly true at Easter, where centuries of European immigration have shaped the culinary traditions in New York. The Easter feast became a religiously sanctioned opportunity to indulge For my family, the Easter feast typically includes a herb-crusted leg of lamb (American only; New Zealand lamb is far too gamey), deviled eggs, rich scalloped potatoes, honey-glazed carrots, some fresh spring vegetables and an absurdly decadent chocolate dessert – all washed down with a robust Etna Rosso, generously poured.

Tuesday

Cockburn

The ‘Senate Twink’ lands in Oz

A surprising item from Down Under: Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the former Senate staffer who was fired after he and his partner filmed themselves in flagrante delicto on Amy Klobuchar’s desk in Hart 216, has resurfaced in Australia after touring the world. Maese-Czeropski gave an interview to the Gay Sydney News about the fallout from his December 2023 rendezvous – which readers of this newsletter were the first to learn about. Maese-Czeropski, who worked as a legislative assistant for then-senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, says he spent “a little bit in the psych ward” after his firing, before moving to Sydney by way of South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean. https://www.instagram.

Senate Twink Aidan Maese-Czeropski

Monday

Svitlana Morenets

There was Easter but no truce on Ukraine’s frontline

From our UK edition

Kramatorsk, Donetsk region In a wooden Greek-Catholic church on the frontline of a warzone, encircled by red tulips and military vehicles, the priest’s sermon is woven through with the war – just like the soldiers’ Easter baskets, packed not only with paska bread, pysanky and sausages, but also with drones, waiting to be blessed. ‘This drone will be at work tonight – enforcing the ceasefire,’ a soldier whispers to me, smiling. The priest looks over a hundred soldiers in front of him, the church so packed that some must listen from the outside, and says that Ukraine will defeat evil, just as Jesus did. ‘The enemy is killing Him in our men and women, they are torturing Him in captivity, our mothers wash their faces with His tears,’ he says.

Ed Condon

Pope Francis and the Vatican reckoning

From our UK edition

Modern popes, for better or for worse, tend to be defined in soundbites. John Paul II’s clarion call of ‘Be not afraid’ became emblematic of his invitation to young Catholics to embrace their faith and his rallying of the West against the spectre of international Communism. Benedict XVI’s great theological career, and his term as a pope in the model of priest and professor, remains summed up in his simple declaration that Deus caritas est. For Francis, who has died at the age of 88, the world will likely remember, in the immediate weeks after his death anyway, his often quoted, though often misrepresented, motto of ‘who am I to judge?

Sunday

Damian Thompson

How should Christians embrace ‘faithful dissent’ today?

From our UK edition

This is an excerpt from the latest episode of the Holy Smoke podcast with Damian Thompson, which you can find at the bottom of this page: The Easter issue of the Spectator includes two provocative articles exploring aspects of Christianity. Nigel Biggar, Regius professor emeritus of moral theology at Oxford University, now a Conservative peer, celebrates the heroic ‘faithful dissent’ of Christian heroes such as Thomas More and Helmuth von Moltke, who lost their lives rather than defend injustice.  Meanwhile Spectator columnist Mary Wakefield interviews Roman Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury. She’s inspired by his holiness but depressed by his use of ‘C of E bureaucratese’ to uphold liberal orthodoxy on subjects such as gender ideology.

Friday

Olivia Potts

Why Easter eggs are getting more expensive

From our UK edition

While the US continues to use the price of chicken eggs as a political (American) football, closer to home our concern is with eggs of a sweeter kind. This year has seen chocolate prices rise dramatically. The price of cocoa had remained stable for decades, but in November 2023 it rocketed and has remained high ever since: it is currently almost three times what it was 18 months ago. The sudden increase came about after particularly poor harvests in West Africa, where more than 80 per cent of the world’s cocoa is grown. Extreme weather, in the form of both record-breaking high temperatures and then very heavy rains, have ravaged the cocoa plantations in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

Melanie McDonagh

Is it time for Christians to unite over Easter?

From our UK edition

So, you thought the date of Easter, which rambles irritatingly round the spring calendar, was settled by the Synod of Whitby, no? That gathering in 664 AD, which established that Northumbria would celebrate Easter in the Roman calendar, used to be one of the events that Every Schoolboy Knows, though probably not now. There were two rival ways of computing Easter, the Celtic and the Roman, and the problem was that King Oswald belonged to the Irish/Iona tradition, and his wife, Eanflaed, kept the Roman calendar. One bit of the court would be in Lent and fasting, vegan-style, and abstaining from sex and fighting, while the other was celebrating Easter, gorging on Paschal lamb and presumably up for conjugal relations and brawling.

Thursday

John Rutter

The world reveres British music

From our UK edition

I have just returned from the lovely Italian city of Rimini, where 300 local singers had gathered for a weekend of choral music under my direction, culminating in a concert in the grand Teatro. As they sang amid the chandeliers, gilded cherubs and plush velvet, I reflected that in all the recent discussion about tariffs, no one has yet highlighted the importance of music as a British export. As a representative of our choral tradition, I was treated with something like the reverence that would be accorded to a Brazilian footballer or a Russian chess player. My host, the regional choral supremo, knew all about our British choirs. His CD collection was filled with British choral recordings and he had just hosted the Tallis Scholars for a packed-out concert.

Olivia Potts

Lamb is for life, not just for Easter

From our UK edition

Roast lamb is as expected on the Easter table as turkey is at Christmas. But as a nation, we are falling out of love with lamb. Meat consumption in Britain is at its lowest level since records began, and according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), lamb has been in particular decline for the past 20 years. We may feel we are supporting the sheep-farming industry, but the truth is a little more complicated There are a number of reasons for this: some people are trying to eat less meat for environmental or ethical reasons, while others don’t enjoy the richer taste of lamb compared with other meats. Perhaps most importantly, after a long period of rising in price more drastically than other meats, the cost of lamb reached record highs last year.

The Spectator

How much steel does Britain produce?

From our UK edition

Double date This year, Orthodox Easter is on the same date as the western Easter, 20 April. How common is that? The Orthodox Church has a different date for Easter because it still calculates the date according to the Julian calendar, which runs 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar. But the dates coincide when the first full moon after the spring equinox occurs relatively late. The dates last coincided in 2017, but eight years is a relatively long run without this happening. This year is the ninth occasion this century when western and Orthodox Easters have been on the same day. A common date for Easter will next happen in 2028, followed by 2031, 2034, 2037 and 2041.

The Spectator

The Easter story reminds us of the importance of truth

From our UK edition

Live not by lies, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned the West half a century ago, but we have hardly heeded him since. Fictions have bewitched our minds and captured our culture. Hard truths struggle to be heard. Last week BBC presenters took the leader of the opposition to task for her failure to watch a Netflix drama, Adolescence, which purported to explore the risks to young women from misogyny. At the same time they ignored Kemi Badenoch’s questions about real male violence – the abuse of thousands of girls by rape gangs in 50 British towns and cities.

Fergus Butler-Gallie

Spare us from performative piety

From our UK edition

Lent did not, I confess, start well. Cheltenham fell in its first week, and the Gold Cup is hardly the place for the rigours of Lenten discipline to begin. Some might say it is hardly the place for a clergyman at all. Peter Hitchens once commented on my clerical collar – stiff, crisp, linen – and said that if he saw a man wearing such a get-up at a racecourse he would assume he was an illegal bookmaker in disguise. Still, I recall that one of the most successful owner-breeders of all time was a clergyman. The vicar of Ashby de la Launde, the Revd J.W. King, won the Oaks, 1,000 Guineas and St Leger with his horse, Apology. There were, as the Bible tells us, giants in the earth in those days.

Monday

Olivia Potts

The hot cross bunfight

From our UK edition

There’s a well-known clip from daytime TV show This Morning where celebrity chef Gino D’Acampo is cooking a classic Italian pasta dish. Holly Willoughby, one of the presenters, tastes it and says: ‘Do you know, if it had, like, ham in it, it’s closer to a British carbonara?’ D’Acampo, in his Italian-accented perfect English, looks at her in horror before replying: ‘If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike.’ This phrase goes round and round in my head as I stand agog in my supermarket’s bakery aisles. Where once there might have been one choice of hot cross bun as we hurtle towards Easter – perhaps one ‘standard’ and one ‘luxury’ in the bigger shops – our options now extend as far as the eye can see.

Friday

Martin Vander Weyer

Can Trump fix eggflation?

"You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs" is a maxim attributed to leaders on both sides of the French Revolution. "Move fast and break things" is today’s equivalent, emanating from Silicon Valley and amply demonstrated by Donald Trump and Elon Musk in their approach to government and geopolitics. "You can’t make omelettes at all if you can’t afford eggs" might be the next variant: inflation and scarcity afflicting America’s favorite breakfast have become a major political issue. In brief, a dozen US eggs used to cost $2 or less but by January this year the supermarket price was $5 and rising – in some places $9 was reported, rationing had to be introduced and Mexican suppliers were spotted smuggling truckloads across the border.

eggs