Society

This year, Good Friday and Passover fall on the same day, or night, really, because Passover starts at sundown on Good Friday. So it’s going to be a busy weekend for America’s favourite interfaith household. Yes, the one at the White House. Give credit where it’s due. The Trumps are an all-American household: a blended, interfaith family, just living the Judaeo-Christian ethic.Donald Trump was raised Presbyterian. Melania, who is rumored to have been secretly baptized when Slovenia was under communism, is the first Catholic first lady since Jackie Kennedy. Don, Jr. and Eric have stayed Presbyterian, but will young Barron follow Melania? Meanwhile, Don Jr.

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.