Faith > Faith features
Advent reflections: Hope, certainty, joy, courage
ADVENT is the season of promise and hope. The two concepts seem at first contradictory. If something is promised, then it is reasonable to suppose that you don’t need to hope that the promise will be kept. Unfortunately,…
Acts of faith and love repeat
AS A New Year resolution, Alexander Berry (Director of Music at Great St Mary’s, Cambridge) challenged himself to learn a really substantial piece of repertoire. Since it was just after Christmas, he chose Messiaen’s…
A life on the Wilde side
AS OSCAR WILDE lay dying in a squalid hotel room in Paris on 28 November 1900, deserted by most of his former friends and admirers and ostracised by respectable society, an old and trusted associate sent for a priest. On…
For God’s pleasure all combine
IN 1969, Michael Stancliffe arrived from St Margaret’s, Westminster as the new Dean of Winchester. Three years later, he invited his former organist from St Margaret’s, Martin Neary, to join him. By the end of 1975, with the…
Japan’s Hidden Christians
FOR four-and-a-half centuries, the Hidden Christians in Japan lived in the shadows. To meet them, I had to go there, too: down the archipelago’s back roads, past the neon metropolises, into a landscape where history lingers…
Remembrance: A lesson in fire-walking
SIMONE WEIL, the French philosopher and mystic, lived almost her whole life in wartime. As a child during the First World War, she gave up her pocket money to sponsor a soldier at the front. She fought in the Spanish Civil…
Read between the lines of our war memorials
JUST across the street from where I lived for the first seven years of my life in a flat above the engineering works established by my grandfather, there is a splendid and unusual war memorial. The memorial was created at the…
A Christian response to suicide
IN THE late 1980s, I wrote a biography of G. K. Chesterton — an intensely original and genuinely important author and journalist, who, in many ways, is more relevant today than in his lifetime (he died in 1936). But beware…
Black History Month: ‘Under-the-tree’ theology
I HAD always thought that studying theology should make me more complex, and that, by the time I left theological college, I would have a big vocabulary that I could use to impress members of the congregation. As time went…
Coming face to face with God
WORK, exercise, sleep, work, exercise, sleep: why do we spend our time not doing the thing that we want to do most? When so much of life is given to labour and health in order to sustain basic needs, how can we find space and…
