Sometimes what you see isn’t all it seems. At first sight, the tower of Beetley church (Norfolk) looks 14th century; in fact, a number of people in the early 16th century left money for the tower, with one will of [...]

Art   Thomas Becket  – murder and the making of a saint   In his fine work, ‘Through the eye of a needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome and the making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD,’ Peter Brown [...]

Christopher Smith has been reading the letters pages   Years ago, when I was a bishop’s chaplain, a great long document used to be faxed out every morning from, I suppose, Church House Westminster, with the day’s press cuttings in [...]

As the long summer approaches many people had hoped that the Coronavirus legislation would have been lifted and our lives might have returned to some semblance of normality. As New Directions goes to press the lockdown has been extended for [...]

You’ve probably just come from Saint Savin-sur-Gartempe (ND August 2010), so the contrast of exteriors is striking. Just across the road from a Lanterne des Morts (ND November 2019), this church has a modest 11th c. nave, with simple W [...]

Andy Hawes    Teaching Prayer   I was amused to read in the introduction to Bede Frost’s book ‘The Art of Mental Prayer’ (published 1931) ‘ Some time ago an English diocesan Bishop addressed a questionnaire to his clergy in [...]

David Craven introduces Ladyewell House in Preston   The harvest is plentiful but the labourers are few. If as Catholics we are to have a future in the Church of England it is essential that we grow vocations, raising up [...]

Nicolas Stebbing introduces a Catholic St Paul   We Catholics tend to be a bit suspicious of St Paul. After all it is was his ideas on justification that set Luther off and caused the Reformation. We prefer the Epistle [...]

Colin Podmore continues his exploration of Anglican doctrine of the Eucharist   Always to the fore in Anglican discussion of the Eucharist in the mid-twentieth century was the sense in which the Eucharist is a sacrifice. A final rapprochement appeared [...]

Denis Desert reflects on a painting by Marc Chagall   It so happened that many years ago as I finished my parish visiting for the day, suitably dressed in a cassock, I went over to view my allotment to check [...]