Christianity

What we are witnessing in Northern Iraq today is the unwinding of lives. Where once they were blurred, intertwined and interdependent, now they are monochrome, distinct, raw. The process is bloody and cruel. The Yazidi community, which has worshipped in the area since before Jonah warned the king of Nineveh to repent, is being deliberately murdered. This isn’t the first time we have watched genocide happen. In Rwanda one group committed the worst massacres since the Holocaust while we stood by. For many reasonable military reasons it was thought too difficult to act: the distance, the internal isolation, the confusion. In Yugoslavia, we watched as men were murdered and women raped in acts perhaps best summarised by the atrocity of Srebrenica. But we didn’t want to get involved

Christians in Mosul have been offered three choices by ISIS: 1. Convert to Islam. 2. Pay the ‘jizya’ tax that renders them dhimmis – i.e., second-class citizens granted limited protection if they hand over half an ounce of pure gold. 3. Death by the sword. They had until noon today to make up their minds. Bit of a no-brainer, really. Mosul’s Christians – Catholics and Orthodox who until this month had celebrated Mass in the city every Sunday for 1,600 years – are fleeing for safety. Perhaps, by the time you read this, Barack Obama – a weekly worshipper at a crazy rabble-rousing church while he was running for office in

I agree with something Owen Jones has written, a confluence of beliefs that will next occur on September 15, 2319. Addressing the subject of Christian persecution, he argues in the Guardian: ‘It is, unsurprisingly, the Middle East where the situation for Christians has dramatically deteriorated in recent years. One of the legacies of the invasion of Iraq has been the purging of a Christian community that has lived there for up to two millennia. It is a crime of historic proportions.’ Most people have rather ignored this crime, as they have other incidents of anti-Christian persecution across Africa and Asia, for as the French philosopher Regis Debray put it: ‘The

The Syro-Iraq war, as the firestorm should probably now be called, rages on, with the sword of Damocles hanging over us in Britain. Some 400 British Muslims are fighting with ISIS – only 150 fewer than the number of Muslims in the whole British Army – and we can be pretty sure of blowback when they return home. Afterwards I imagine we’ll have the politicians lecturing us about how this has nothing to do with Islam and then those bizarre ‘one London’ style posters will appear all over the capital; and 90 per cent of the media coverage will be on the danger of Islamophobia – cue footage of football

Few people, don’t you find, are as irritating as those who define themselves as Spiritual But Not Religious? There was a riveting  piece in the Sunday Times ‘Style’ magazine last week about them, featuring people who were both fabulously stylish and spiritual. Among the names checked was a shop called Celestine Eleven (‘when you buy a new dress, you’re buying into a beautiful piece of energy’) and a website called Numinous (motto: ‘material girl, mystical world’). So, you can be spiritual and design-conscious, as in Pamela Love’s pentagram ring, £1,500. What this Gwyneth Paltrow-style combination of spirituality and consumerism involves, apart from the absence of any kind of discernible doctrine,

Canon Andrew White is one of the bravest men you could ever meet. He is the Anglican vicar of St George’s Church in Baghdad and has continued his service in that country throughout its recent horrors. He has lost hundreds of members of his congregation but he has remained an extraordinary, humbling and hope-giving presence throughout recent years. But now, with ISIS having taken over Mosul and surrounding areas in recent hours, he says that things are worse than at any point in the last decade. This, Nineveh, is the heartland of Iraqi Christianity. In this heart-breaking call for help, Canon White writes: ‘Iraq is now in its worst crisis

The conviction of Max Clifford for indecent assaults feels like a vindication of the jury system, as did the acquittal of the many other showbiz characters charged under Operation Yewtree. One reason I keep raising questions of justice about the current obsession with paedophilia is out of suspicion that those most zealous in their accusations are unhealthily interested in the subject. This was the case with Clifford himself and, of course, with the newspapers with which he did business. Celebrity culture is, in essence, a form of pornography which incites powerful people to exploit unpowerful people. It acquires an extra twist of perversion when it turns on those it has