Kenton Allen

See change, A.I. ghouls & long live the long lunch!

From our UK edition

38 min listen

This week: the many crises awaiting the next pope‘Francis was a charismatic pope loved by most of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics’ writes Damian Thompson in the cover article this week. But few of them ‘grasp the scale of the crisis in the Church… The next Vicar of Christ, liberal or conservative’ faces ‘challenges that dwarf those that confronted any incoming pope in living memory’.   Ahead of Pope Francis’s funeral this weekend, Damian joined the podcast alongside the Catholic theologian Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith to unpack all the political intrigue underpinning the upcoming papal conclave. They say that he who enters the conclave as a pope, leaves as a cardinal – do we have any clues to who could emerge as Francis’s successor?

Long live the long lunch!

From our UK edition

I keep on my bedside table, where others might place religious texts, Keith Waterhouse’s seminal The Theory and Practice of Lunch. Waterhouse, that magnificent chronicler of Fleet Street’s liquid lunches and disappearing afternoons, understood what modern efficiency cultists cannot: that civilisation is measured not by what we produce but by how elegantly we pause. His gospel preaches that a proper lunch requires ‘two-and-a-half hours of quality time at a quality establishment’, a commandment I try to observe with monastic devotion at least twice a week. The book’s spine is cracked at the chapter entitled ‘The Lunch Bore’.