In a comment piece in Wednesday’s London Evening Standard, Douglas Carswell MP – a refreshingly libertarian voice in the age of cuddly/progressive/compassionate Conservatism - took up the Church of England’s recent claim that the same-sex marriage would push the Church in the direction of disestablishment.
According to Twitter, Boris Johnson, London’s Conservative mayoral candidate put his foot in his mouth rather badly at the churches’ hustings when he said that you can serve both God and mammon.
Two signs have appeared of late in my local park. One invites concerned locals to join a group dedicated to the health of said park. The other (which is more of a series of signs sprayed on various paths) advises dog walkers to tidy up after their defecating pooches.
Roger Trigg is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University. He is Academic Director of the Centre for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Kellog College Oxford. He is the author of the Theos report, Free to Believe? And he is worried.
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Alain De Botton has published a new book entitled, provocatively, Religion for Atheists. Terry Eagleton’s blistering (and in some ways brilliant) review in the Guardian is here, and is likely to be only the first such attack.
The made-to-order responses from Terry Sanderson and Andrew Copson to David Cameron’s speech on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible suggest that they have read the headlines but not the text itself. Much of the speech was simply a factual recounting of the substantial historical influence of the Bible on the values underpinning British politics and society and of the contemporary contributions churches make, alongside people of other faiths or none, to the welfare of society today. His claim that ‘Britain is a Christian country’ was largely descriptive, although historians and sociologists will no doubt want to press him for more a more nuanced account of how that influence operated and still operates in particular instances.
The national curriculum is under review. The government wants a slim-line version, which prescribes “only the essential knowledge that all children should acquire”.