JAMAICA claims to have the world’s highest density of churches. On Heart and Soul (BBC World Service, Friday), Nick Davis reported from the country’s south-west, the part most seriously devastated by Melissa, a Category 5 hurricane, last October (News, 7 November 2025).
At the historic St John’s, Black River, the organist, Allison Morris, leads a team of volunteers sifting through the rubble for the remains of statues and other artefacts, as well as for whole bricks to be used in any future reconstruction. The experience has both tested and strengthened her faith.
A moment of jubilation in the midst of this back-breaking, months-long effort was finding the parish’s eight-foot processional cross in good order.
Inland, at Lacovia, the Revd Tony Reid is the priest-in-charge of a group of four rural churches, now devastated, together with many local in the area. Although he was pragmatic about what might be rebuilt, he reported enormous community demand — from non-churchgoers, as well as churchgoers, adults and children alike — for his churches to be restored to their original form, even as these people’s own homes lay in ruins. Much of his own energy, since the hurricane, had been taken up with finding basic shelter and sustenance for people who had lost everything.
Sunday (Radio 4) carried another under-reported international story: the rise of nationalistic Buddhist extremism in Asia. The London-based Indian writer Sonia Faleiro was plugging her new book, The Robe and the Sword, exploring the phenomenon. She agreed with the presenter, Emily Buchanan, that Western views of Buddhism — largely a product of the global wellness industry — were sanitised, ignoring the fact that Buddhists were people like anyone else, with the normal run of human failings.
Militant monks in Myanmar and Sri Lanka used identical rhetoric to that of populists worldwide, Ms Faleiro said. But neither she nor Ms Buchanan asked hard questions about why a similar backlash was taking place in radically different countries at the same time.
The podcast The Best of Times Radio (Sunday) often re-runs podcasts from other parts of the same media empire. Manveen Rana’s interview for “The Story”, with the longstanding religion correspondent Kaya Burgess, on the clash between the Pope and President Trump, stood out in style from equivalent BBC pieces.
One avenue of exploration was the degree of difference between Roman Catholic and Evangelical MAGA supporters; the former tend to be more sceptical, on average, about foreign military interventions and about US policy towards Israel. They also examined J. D. Vance’s social-media spats with Rory Stewart and Canterbury Cathedral, and the bizarre encounter in January, when US defence officials warned the Papal Nuncio about the Avignon papacy (Comment, 17 April).
The Democratic operative and Roman Catholic blogger Christopher Hale said that, in politically monochrome “MAGA country”, the Roman Catholic Church was the most significant force opposing President Trump.
