The road to peace and reconciliation is a complex and painful process, whether in national or indeed individual conflicts. It involves the conquering of fear, the dealing with bitterness and outrage, and the building of trust. It can be supported or...
Some time ago at a buffet lunch in a church hall - not quite a fine dining event - I recall a lively conversation between an unemployed man in early middle age and an older, wealthy industrialist. The younger man commented that unemployment was hard...
The Passover season is well and truly on us.We're preparing our homes for the festival of freedom, with its special foods and elaborate rituals, one of the oldest religious rituals in the world, and one of Judaism's most sacred moments. What's specia...
In the past, religion's contribution to this debate has been from a moral standpoint about the questions of poor behaviour that are encouraged by the loss of our inhibitions. But the truth is that Christianity has a complex relationship with alcohol,...
Surely nothing tests the faith of the believer as much as this - the sudden, frightening, violent death of those we love.There have been many attempts to reconcile intellectually such unbearable tragedies with faith in a loving God. They range from t...
As things are, I see two dangers and they are linked. The first is that if the Church is quick to assert and slow to listen, it can give the impression to its own members that moral insight is never to be had outside Christianity and that can be hear...
I'm hesitant here to quote anyone from the Bible because recently when I mentioned a saying of Jesus someone objected that he had never run anything in his life. The same's true of St Paul. But writing to the well-off in the city of Corinth about hel...
Few of us want to appear dependent: witness the rugged determination of many older people to resist support to which they're entitled; and the intense frustration of some who've spent a lifetime caring for others who now find it painfully difficult t...
And of course that's just where the problems lie. Though people on both sides appeal to what is natural, nature unhelpfully supports both sides liking both consistency and variety in gender and sexuality. So most people are male or female, but there...
The debate on gay marriage is making me uncomfortable. Columnists tell me breezily that I should welcome it because of equality. Catholic and Anglican Bishops say I should shun it because it undermines one of the fundamental building blocks of societ...
