Religion

When I told my friends that I was planning to attend a silent retreat, they all laughed. It’s true that I am something of a convivialist; my idea of heaven is a big table in a warm restaurant, the table shimmering with the laughter of friends and the glugging of wine, and me picking up the bill. On the other hand, I was a solitary only child and I look back on those days with great fondness. Before the long stagger up the primrose path of pleasure started, the only companion I needed was a book; I well remember my mother crying because I preferred to sit in my room

Pope Francis, is, according to Cardinal Walter Kasper – a Swabian formerly responsible for ecumenism – neither a traditionalist nor a liberal – “both of which categories have become rather timeworn and hackneyed” – but rather a radical who wants to advance a revolution of forgiveness. Well, that’s what Christians are kind of for, even if most of us fall rather short of the ideal. But though the liberal/trad categories may indeed be a bit hackneyed – possibly because they’re completely and utterly lost on the secular majority — it’s not to say that the old agendas aren’t still being fought over with gusto. And right at the top of

The first pagan temple to be built in Iceland for a thousand years has just been granted planning permission, a wonderful bureaucratic detail that shows up just how much this revival is polite make-believe. Ragnar Hairybreeks or Harald Bluetooth would not seek planning permission before building a place of sacrifice. At Gamla Uppsala, the Viking temple site in Sweden, horses were hanged to please the gods in groups of nine from trees, along with cattle, sheep, and human beings. In Reykjavik today’s pagans still eat sacred horsemeat at their feasts, but they buy it in from caterers. Respectable modern paganism is not only made up, as its leading ideologues cheerfully

It’s been said for years now: Islam needs its reformation. Some centuries ago, Christianity ditched its theocratic impulse and affirmed modern political values — let Islam do likewise! Let its Luther, who is presumably sulking in the corner of some madrassa, come forward! Islam hath need of him! This sounds briskly no-nonsense, in its willingness to say that Islam has a problem that needs fixing, and open-minded about religion, in its assumption that religions can change and be compatible with secularism. But it’s actually lazy and historically illiterate. It involves a misreading of how Christianity relates to modernity. It implies that, once upon a time, Christianity was in conflict with

After Islamist terrorist atrocities, political leaders often rush to say that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam. One can understand why they feel the need to do this but the problem is the terrorists clearly do think, however mistakenly, that they are acting in the name of Islam. But if any politician wants to know how to answer the question about the link between terrorism and Islam, they should look at these answers from the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby in an interview with The New York Times: There are aspects of Islamic practice and tradition at the moment that involve them in violence, as there are, incidentally,

‘We are avenging the Prophet Muhammad’ shouts the jihadi murderer as he escapes, having killed 12 at Charlie Hebdo. In Syria, an American fighting for al-Qaeda says: ‘I want to rest in the afterlife, in heaven. There is nothing here’. There are thousands of young men and women in our midst who share these sentiments. They believe that their cause is worth dying for – and they want to have that honour, confident in the reward that they will get for their actions. They are disillusioned, not disenfranchised. Many are well-educated, with a good family life. But they seek a value that they can fight for – a cause for

The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault. In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have ‘nothing to do with Islam’. It was said by George W. Bush after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7 and Tony Abbott after the Sydney attack last month. It is what David Cameron said after two British extremists cut off the head of Drummer Lee Rigby in London, when ‘Jihadi John’ cut off the head of

The French liberal-left and George W Bush are not natural bedfellows, but today the former are sounding just a little bit like the latter. The ‘Je suis Charlie’ banners they are carrying in reaction to yesterday’s murders at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo are effectively saying, to borrow the former US president’s slogan: you are either with us or you are with the terrorists. The terror attack, of course, deserves universal condemnation. It is an act of cold-blooded murder. That it was carried out against a targeted group makes it neither better nor worse than 9/11 or the London tube bombings which were conducted against random victims.