Christianity

Monday

Damian Thompson

Why liberals turn a blind eye to the global persecution of Christians

The new episode of Holy Smoke is about the persecution of Christians. That's a familiar concept, even if we don't read much about it in the media. But here's what it means in 2019: The rape, murder and dismemberment of pregnant Christian women in Nigeria by Islamist thugs. The use of face-recognition technology by the Chinese government to monitor, control and, where it deems necessary, eradicate Christian worship by demolishing thousands of churches The evisceration of ancient Christian communities in the lands of the Bible. The relentless torture of Christians in North Korea. The burning of Christian villages by Hindu nationalists in India, and vicious attacks on Christians in Sri Lanka and Burma by Buddhists, egged on by bloodthirsty monks.

Thursday

Jonathan Sumption

Did Christianity make the western mind — or was it the other way round?

Nobody can accuse Tom Holland of shying away from big subjects. Dominion is nothing less than a history of Christianity with an underlying theme. The subtitle says it all. It is dedicated to the idea that Christianity has formed the western mind, not just in its moral and intellectual conventions but in their opposites, such as atheism or the natural sciences. An argument so paradoxical provokes thought, whether one agrees with it or not. This one is sustained with all the breadth, originality and erudition that we have come to associate with Holland’s writing. The technique is a sort of literary pointillism. An incident, an image, an individual, a place are presented as capturing the spirit of an epoch.

Thursday

Greg Sheridan

Losing our religion | 8 August 2019

There is no faster way to get yourself classed as dim than by admitting that you hold religious belief, especially Christian belief. Anti-Catholicism used to be the anti-Semitism of intellectuals; now Catholics get no special attention. All believing Christians are regarded as stupid, eccentric or malevolent. Some conservatives will make the case for the social usefulness of Christian values. The conservative asks: if society prospered with these traditions and customs, is it really wise to throw them away without a moment’s hesitation? That is just what the West is doing, especially the Anglophone West. Britain, Australia and even the God-fearing United States are becoming atheist societies.

Sunday

Dennis Lennox

The Church of England needs mission

The time has come to disestablish the Church of England. As a deeply partisan Prayer Book Anglican – a churchmanship naturally inclined to support the cause of antidisestablishmentarianism – I say that rather grudgingly. But it pains me to admit the established church and mother church of Anglicanism is no longer fit for purpose. Atheists, militant secularists and those of non-Christian faiths have long supported my newly-held position, yet they often do so for other reasons, namely declining church attendance. They might claim that the Anglican expression of Christianity has little creditability as a state church if, practically speaking, nobody goes to services on a regular basis. And they might have a point.

Thursday

Taki

High life | 6 June 2019

They were putting the finishing touches to the giant tent as I drove up to Schloss Wolfsegg after an hour’s flight from Gstaad to a tiny nearby airport. With me were my son and two good friends, and the Pilatus felt like a Messerschmitt 109 cutting through the clouds and landing on a dime. The Pilatus is a great airplane. It can cruise for seven hours at 280 knots, and land at less than 500 metres. It seats six people very comfortably. The only man who has complained about this aircraft is my old friend Charlie Glass, who like a true lefty whined about the lavatory’s headroom. (I told him to try EasyJet next time, but lefties like to fly private and not mix with hoi polloi.

Thursday

Peter Jones

Christianity’s curiosities

Last week Tom Holland reflected on the ‘utter strangeness’ of Christianity’s claim that Christ’s death on the cross was a sign of strength. St Paul agreed: ‘We preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the gentiles [correcting the SJV ‘Greeks’] foolishness.’ So did pagan philosophers, who argued fiercely about the nature of the gods. One such was Celsus (2nd C ad), who wrote an anti-Christian diatribe, ‘The True Doctrine’. It survives only in the quotations used by Origen in refuting it (248 ad). Though Celsus had a sense of humour (Christians respected the cross as the tree of life: had Jesus been thrown off a cliff, would there be a cliff of life?), he was deadly earnest about Christianity.

Bruce Anderson

Given up hope? Join the club

During the Middle Ages, some of the monastic halls which evolved into Oxbridge colleges allowed their younger inmates to indulge in jocundus honestus after the evening meal. There is nothing monastic about the clubs around St James’s, least of all at their dining tables. But there is still plenty of jocund. Honestus? That is another matter. The other evening, in a gathering well-equipped with bottles and glasses, someone remarked that we were still in the last lap of Lent and then asked an improbable and unexpected question: ‘So what have you given up, Anderson?’ I was pleased with my reply: ‘Hope.

Julie Burchill

Keeping the faith | 25 April 2019

After hearing about the massacre in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, I went to church, happily sang the word God and stuffed £20 in the collection plate. I’m a believer and am lucky to have a lovely church on the corner of the square where I live. I attend irregularly, but on my frequent walks to my volunteer job I always enjoy disapproving as I read the list of activities going on at the community centre which is in ‘the award-winning conversion’ (the sin of pride, for starters) of the nave of the church — bridge (gambling), astrology circle (false prophets), kung-fu (violence) and pilates (vanity), all in one week! Tutting happily, I go on my merry way.

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley

Sri Lanka and the global war on Christians

The Easter Sunday massacre in Sri Lanka, which targeted churches and hotels, has so far claimed 310 lives and left a further 500 people injured. National Thowheed Jamath, a local Islamist group, has been implicated but authorities believe it received support from an international terrorist organisation. Colombo has declared a state of emergency and rounded up 40 suspects but the government’s swift response belies its behaviour before the atrocity.

Wednesday

Revd Steve Morris

The wonder of Whitby

The 199 steps up to the ruins of Whitby Abbey are a pilgrimage; they always have been. And any good pilgrimage takes effort. Count Dracula (also acquainted with the north Yorkshire town) cheated — he climbed the steps in the guise of a black hound. These days, with its new £1.6 million museum and visitor centre, our vampire friend would find a ground-floor café and gift shop. Knowing English Heritage, there is probably a bowl of water for dogs, which would have kept the Count happy. Whitby is a surprise, with a history that puts it at the heart of Britain’s spiritual and literary life. It’s also a vibrant fishing port, somewhere you can pick up a Whitby smoky — smoked herrings — made in a backstreet smokehouse.

Tom Holland

The way of the cross

Declarations of hope that Notre Dame can be resurrected have been much in evidence this Holy Week. Such is the lesson of Easter: that life can come from death. Unlike the Eiffel Tower, that other great emblem of Paris, Notre Dame provides the French with evidence that their modern and secular republic has its foundations deeply rooted in the Middle Ages. Notre Dame has always been more than just an assemblage of stone and stained glass. It is a monument as well to a specifically Christian past. Last summer, one of the world’s best-known scientists, a man as celebrated for his polemics against religion as for his writings on evolutionary biology, sat in another cathedral, Winchester, listening to the bells peal.

Kate Chisholm

Hard lines

As if in defiance of the BBC’s current obsession with programming designed to entice in that elusive young and modish audience, Radio 4 has set us an Easter challenge. Each afternoon over the weekend Jeremy Irons is reading a chunk from The Psalms for half an hour, without illustration (except a bit of music), explication or deviation. It’s a discomfiting listen, at times harsh, unrelenting. The supple but rigorous language of the King James Version of the Bible is both daunting and uplifting. ‘Keep me as the apple of the eye’ is one of my favourite images, and ‘hide me under the shadow of thy wings’ has helped me through many a long night.

Monday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The return of plainchant

‘I’m still warmed up from last night,’ said Sophie Bevan early on a Sunday morning in the practice-room behind the presbytery of St Birinus Catholic Church in the charming village of Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire – a tiny Pugin-esque gem dwarfed by the enormous Anglican abbey up the road. She and the other four members of the Davey Consort (two of them her cousins from the musical Bevan clan) were running through a Renaissance polyphonic mass, with Sophie’s husband, the composer and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, directing from the practice harpsichord.

Wednesday

Andrew Mahon

Why Peter Sellars’s staging of the St John Passion – which I sang in – was deeply flawed

It has been my privilege over the past two weeks to sing in the chorus of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under conductor Simon Rattle and director Peter Sellars in a staged production of J.S. Bach’s St John Passion. The experience has been life changing for some of my colleagues; it has certainly been unique. Dressed in black casual clothing, we spend much of the performance sauntering around the stage making abstract gestures intended to highlight certain words and distill the myriad emotions found in the music. Some find this effective; others find it silly.

Thursday

Theo Hobson

Why don’t we talk about Van Gogh’s Christian faith?

Vincent Van Gogh has been airbrushed by the secular arts media. I have not yet seen the new exhibition at Tate Britain about his London years, so I can only comment on the publicity I have read and heard. This arts chatter downplays, or even ignores, the central feature of his life at this time: his religious zeal. It gives the impression that he was dedicating himself to art, gearing up to be the archetypal creative genius. In reality he did not take art fully seriously in the mid 1870s: though he worked for an art dealer, his real passion was religion.

Thursday

Tom Goodenough

Bible bashers

Being a street preacher can be a thankless business. Since moving to Britain from Nigeria nine years ago, 64-year-old Oluwole Ilesanmi has toured the country reading aloud from the Bible, spending hours outside train stations, urging people to see the light. Sometimes he makes a convert; most of the time his preaching falls on deaf ears. Last month, it resulted in him being arrested. Saturday 23 February began like a typical day for Ilesanmi. He went to Southgate tube station in north London and preached for a few hours. His spiel included a disobliging reference to Islam, which seemed to rile a passer-by. To Ilesanmi’s surprise he was then accosted by the man.

Thursday

Theo Hobson

Justin Welby has shown why his church is in such trouble

Sorry to sound sectarian, but the Archbishop of Canterbury should really be able to articulate a preference for Anglicanism over other variants of Christianity, including Roman Catholicism. Interviewed here in this week's Spectator, he was more or less invited to do so; instead he said that he was entirely positive about Anglican priests converting to Rome. Hard to imagine the Pope saying the same thing in reverse. Ecumenical enthusiasm is all very nice, but a Church is in trouble if it can’t say why people should stay within it, or choose it over other options. So what is Anglicanism’s selling point? The answer is unfashionable but unavoidable: its socio-political liberalism. Note that I do not say simply ‘liberalism’.

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 13 December 2018

Crisis at Christmas MPs were warned that they might have to give up part of their holidays to deal with Brexit. Here are some other political crises from Christmases past: 1066 William I was crowned on 25 December. Trouble was expected from the English so the streets of Westminster were lined two deep with soldiers. The service was interrupted by a boisterous crowd and houses near the abbey were set alight. 1974 Embarrassment for Harold Wilson on Christmas Eve — his former postmaster general John Stonehouse turned up in Australia, having faked his own death. 1989 Deposed Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena had their festive season curtailed by a brief trial, after which they were shot.

Thursday

Ed West

Brought to book | 15 November 2018

‘The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of death we are either drowned or killed.’ So wrote the British monk Gildas in his 6th-century proto-polemic On the Ruin of Britain, recording the arrival of the hated ‘Germans’ to the island. Bad news for the Britons, but fantastic for visitors to the British Library, now running perhaps the most significant exhibition of recent times, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms. Historians dislike the term ‘Dark Ages’, but by any measurement western Europe saw a collapse in living standards, literacy, population, trade and significant cultural output from 500 ad. Yet that only makes the flame that appeared all the more striking, and the exquisite art so inspiring.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Tim Farron just can’t escape gay sex

What does Tim Farron think about gay sex? Like Ken Livingstone's repeated reluctance to discuss Hitler, the former Lib Dem leader has never really offered his views on the subject. This time a year ago, for instance, he was so busy talking about all the things his party was putting into its general election manifesto that there was just never time for the matter to creep into interviews. He's never avoided questions on gay sex, or changed his views on gay sex, or offered formulations which sound as though he loves gay people (just not in The Way) but actually mean he doesn't think they should be having gay sex. So what a surprise that gay sex has cropped up as a problem for Farron this week. It's not like it's ever been in an issue before.