Faith > Faith features
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…
In the shadow of the Cross
I WAS in Exeter, almost unexpectedly. That feeling of sacred time, of being exactly where one is meant to be, hit me like a quiet wave.I had come to visit my sister, fresh from completing her Ph.D. at the University of…
John Buchan and the vigorous pursuit of peace
THE Victorian ideal of Christian manliness — so alien in today’s world — was at its height in the decade of John Buchan’s birth. The phrase had been brought into popular consciousness in a series of pamphlets published by the…
Creationtide: How all may yet be well
PROFESSOR Panu Pihkala, of the University of Helsinki, has written that ecological grief is a “moral emotion” (in Eco-Anxiety, Tragedy, and Hope, Zygon, 2018). He finds that eco-anxiety is rarely clinical and is rather a…
Faith: Moving towards the presence
WHEN I travel on the waterways of England, its beauty seems inexhaustible — always different, always fresh. I reach for my mobile to capture each new prospect. It seems impossible to take a bad photo. As the phone storage…
TRENDING
