The resignation of Baroness Warsi over the government’s policy on Gaza means that the relatively recently created role of Minister for Faith and Communities is unfilled.
Lord Patten, it has been announced, will be advising Pope Francis on improving the Vatican’s use of media. Cue immediate and inevitable misreporting of what that actually means in practice. The Daily Mail led the way with the headline “God’s Spinner” and opening line “Tory peer Lord Patten has become a spin doctor for the Pope - just two months after stepping down from the BBC for health reasons.” The Guardian was not alone in reaching for sexual abuse scandal as a common feature between Patten’s tenure at the BBC and the Vatican, the implicit suspicion being that the Church needs someone to spin that disaster away.
What did you inherit from your parents in terms of attitudes and values?
Halal food has taken a sustained battering in recent months. The President-elect of the British Veterinary Association hit the headlines when he proposed that the UK should follow Denmark and ban religious slaughter of animals without stunning. Now the news that all Pizza Express and Subway meat is Halal has caused an upsurge in media pieces calling for such meat to be labelled accordingly. This according to Brendan O’Neill in the Telegraph is important in allowing people to choose.
It is the world’s most commonly performed surgical procedure – but more than any other it now divides global medical opinion.
Picture if you can a country in which parents had to explain to children what “food bank” meant because a generous and savvy welfare system, working in tandem with well–resourced voluntary groups in support of strengthened families and households, prevented people ever falling so low that they couldn’t afford the price of a bag of sugar.
Once upon a time, economists were moral philosophers, or maybe theologians, before they were economists. The point of this oft-noted observation is not that moral philosophy or theology somehow answers economic questions but that economics is, at root, the offspring of a family of intellectual disciplines, rather than the paterfamilias itself.
In Danny Boyle’s vibrant opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics, the most impressive moment was Akram Khan’s muted dance, accompanied by Emile Sandé’s rendition of Abide With Me. In stark contrast to the rest of Boyle’s confident, colourful and humorous exploration of Britishness, and to the International Olympic Committee’s quazi-religious fruitcakery, Boyle had given Khan a one word brief: mortality. The ceremony was full of light and music, apart from the dance, which was dimly lit and very tense. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear the moment posed a quiet question against self-confidence of human physical prowess – what about death?
Rev, the BBC sitcom about a priest struggling in an inner city parish, is arguably one of the best advertisements for the work of the Church of England in recent years. Its main character, Revd Adam Smallbone, rarely has enough money to pay the bills, preaches to a half-empty church and is often plagued by self doubt.