I think there’s a sense that atheism is what your parents did and it didn’t really work, and therefore people are looking for alternatives and asking some really big questions
Pete Greig, writer and pastor, The News Agents, 1 August
For years we kept our relationship secret because I worried about waking up and finding myself outed on the front page of a newspaper. Now, Wendy joins me everywhere, and when I take services, it’s just normal. But in England she had to stay upstairs if I had a meeting in the house
Cherry Vann, Archbishop of Wales, interview in The Guardian, 4 August
As a churchgoer, I do not absolutely insist that the next Archbishop of Canterbury should be a lesbian, though I would much prefer it if she were. If not a lesbian, then let us have someone who realises the potential in the role. That is, not to shore up the establishment but to prod it, from inside and without
A. N. Wilson, The Times, 2 August
Even as church attendances creep up across Europe and North America, the plight of Christians is neither a fashionable nor popular cause for the socially conscious. But westerners owe their solidarity — and western governments their diplomatic might — to these embattled minorities. Church leaders in Britain and abroad must take up the cause, ensuring that these atrocities are not relegated to footnotes in the news agenda
Leader, The Times, 31 July
I have a dialogue with God at the end of the day. I was raised in the Catholic church and decided to become a priest at one point, but I saw too much horrible stuff at the seminary. That’s where I became Johnny Vegas, my defence mechanism
Johnny Vegas, comedian, interview in The Sunday Times, 3 August
They [political leaders] are simply poor at making big arguments, whether about faith and community integration in a migration-changed country, or the natural limits of the welfare state
Andrew Marr, The New Statesman, 1 August
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