Society

How we love our homes: we make them cosy and secure, protected from the outside world, defended by locks, bolts and burglar alarms. But we haven’t always had our own private dwellings, and under the invasive influence of the internet, home, as we’ve come to understand it, may well soon be a thing of the past. In early medieval times, a home was often just a basic tenement, a shelter shared with cattle, owned by an employer. As prosperity spread, so a sense of the private developed. Common areas subdivided into individual ones; pieces of furniture (chests, bookcases, beds, wardrobes) marked areas for particular activities and specific people. At the same time, a sense of home as a place of refuge started to take hold.

I write this on my last day in the Bagel, and it sure is a scorcher, heat and humidity so high that the professional beggars on Fifth Avenue have moved closer to the lakes in Central Park. Heat usually calms the passions, but nowadays groupthink pundits are so busy presenting fake news as journalism you’d think this was election week in November. Here’s one jerk in the New York Times: ‘The court’s decision was narrow…’ The decision in question is the Supreme Court ruling that a baker could refuse a gay couple’s request for a cake on religious grounds. The writer who described the result as narrow, one Adam Liptak (Lipgloss would be more appropriate), did not mention that the vote was seven to two. Talk about fake news.

A solution ‘must be found’ in order to halt the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their families, according to an American cardinal. That’s hardly news, you may say: the US conference of bishops is united in outrage at this cruel practice. But the cardinal I’m quoting is Raymond Leo Burke, former Archbishop of St Louis, a theological and political conservative who is the closest thing the president has to an ally in the American hierarchy. Cardinal Burke therefore finds himself in an unfamiliar place: on the same side of the fence as the man who sacked him from a top-ranking post in the Vatican, Pope Francis.

The divide in the world’s largest Protestant denomination has widened beyond issues related to gay marriage. Controversy in the Episcopal Church, the U.S. branch of the global Anglican Communion, over the revision of traditional marriage and the ordination of openly gay and partnered clergy and bishops is old news. The new split centres on the role the archbishop of Canterbury plays in the Anglican Communion, which consists of churches, formally known as provinces, drawn largely upon national boundaries. That was evident at the Global Anglican Future Conference, a confab of some 2,000 theological conservatives from 50 countries, held in Jerusalem.

New York This week 50 years ago saw the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a man I met a couple of times in the presence of Aristotle Onassis, whom some Brit clown-writer once dubbed Bobby’s murderer. (Bad books need to sell, and what better hook than a conspiracy theory implicating a totally innocent man?) I once witnessed Bobby, at a Susan Stein party, asking Onassis for funds — the 1968 election was coming up — and Ari showing Bobby his two empty trouser pockets. Bobby’s assassination did alter American politics. Violence, black anger and despair spilled out on to the streets of American cities.

Just before Ireland voted overwhelmingly to end the country’s constitutional ban on abortion, Catholics in the fishing village of Clogherhead could be seen storming out of Sunday mass halfway through the service. Why? Their parish priest had come on too strong. He had not only ordered them how to vote but also supplied grisly details of an abortion procedure. Presumably some of them voted to repeal the eighth amendment. The ‘Yes’ campaign couldn’t have won its two-thirds majority without the support of practising Catholics. Very few of these, we can assume, were militantly pro-choice. Instead, they were reassured by promises that any future law would be limited in its impact — and determined to ignore a Catholic hierarchy contaminated by child abuse.

It will, as one pro-life campaigner told me, take an act of God to swing the Irish referendum for the No side tomorrow. I’m all for referendums but this one has been so wildly unbalanced as to make the Brexit campaign look almost effete in its regard for impartiality and fair play. The polls suggest a win for the Yes side, on repealing the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution which protects the right to life of the unborn – something around the 44-32 per cent margin according to the last Irish Times poll. It’s a big deal, abortion. But there is not one political party that represents the No side other than a tiny outfit called Renua which doesn’t have a single MP. There is no newspaper that represents this quite hefty minority.

It will come as no surprise that something in the news has Piers Morgan deeply troubled. For the past two days, Morgan has been incandescent over the Met Gala and its dress code. In a column for MailOnline he claims that, as a Catholic, he has become a victim of cultural appropriation due to fancy dress outfits worn to a party by celebrities.The Gala, a fixture of the New York social season at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is well known for the theme it sets, and this year it was ‘Heavenly Bodies’ - inspired by the Roman Catholic Church. The Gala was held to launch an exhibition of the same name. Dozens of items of religious clothing have been allowed out of the Vatican Archives to be seen by the public for the first time.Guests at the party took the dress code to heart.

When poor old battered Odysseus landed on Circe’s island having lost all his ships (except his flagship) when he tangled with the Laestrygonians (their king liked to eat Greek flesh and swallowed up most of his crews, yummy) Circe — witch, sorceress and goddess in her own right — turned the few survivors into swine, except for Odysseus, whom she wanted for some old-fashioned hanky-panky. If she were around today she would most probably be the first American female president. Odysseus serviced her rather well and stayed in her palace for a year. He also used the ‘moly’, the antidote Hermes had given him in the form of a magic herb that turned pigs back into men.

Hell is a hell of a problem. Eternal punishment of the damned is a basic dogma of the Catholic Church and most other forms of Christianity. But the Bible has surprisingly little to say about it, and philosophers have struggled for millennia to give a rigorous account of what hell would really mean. Without reason or revelation giving a clear picture, hell has been left to the popular imagination to fill in with scenes of devils either scary or absurd poking people with their pitchforks.

Gstaad The muffled sound of falling snow is ever-present. It makes the dreary beautiful and turns the bleak into magic. Happiness is waking up to a winter wonderland. From where I am, I can’t hear the shrieks of children sledding nearby but I can see the odd off-piste skier and the traces they leave. I can no longer handle deep snow, just powder. But I can still shoot down any piste once I’ve had a drink or two. For amusement I listen to the news: flights grounded, trains cancelled, cars backed up on motorways, people stocking up on food and drink as if an atom bomb had been detonated over the Midlands. In Norway it snows every day of the winter and half of the days of autumn and spring. The last time a train was cancelled there was during the German invasion in 1940.

Billy Graham, the American evangelist, has died at the age of 99. Here John Betjeman recounts his experience of attending one of Graham’s Greater London Crusade events, in an article first published in the Spectator in March 1954: Every night the Harringay arena is packed; every night throngs of converts—mostly young people—crowd up at the end of the service to the bare space below the rostrum, thence to be conducted by ‘counsellors’ to a room where they are interviewed and given tracts. This is the Greater London Crusade of Billy Graham and I think he must be cynical indeed who affects to despise the crusade or doubt the sincerity of its promoters.