Christopher Smith recalls the work of this column’s founder I was terribly sad to hear that Geoffrey Kirk died on Good Friday, although I was aware that he’d not been all that well for some years.  Many, perhaps most, readers [...]

The watchword of the minute seems to be unprecedented. As we continue, at the time of writing, in lockdown each day seems to bring something new and something unprecedented; whether for good or ill. Two unprecedented moments that brought joy [...]

A Communion Mourns Tributes have been paid to the late Mar Francis II, Archbishop of the Old Northern Catholick Church of the East Riding, Metropolitan and Primate, who died on 22 April. His Grace’s predecessor, Blessed Mar Terry I, died [...]

How important is church? Andy Hawes  Priest friends are divided in predicting the effect of Corona Virus on church life. One view is that church going, being such a hard habit to establish for many people, will stop altogether for [...]

Jonathan Baker remembers The Revd Dr Geoffrey Kirk, theologian Geoffrey Kirk was a man of sharp mind and fierce intelligence. As a satirist and a polemicist, he was unafraid to wield either in exposing what he perceived to be woolly, [...]

Ailsa Temple remembers Geoffrey Kirk as a parish priest On reading Fr Davage’s history of the Parish of St Stephen’s it appears obvious that in 1981 Fr Geoffrey Kirk was parachuted into a time of dissention and general irritability, with [...]

Geoffrey Kirk 10 December 1945 - 10 April 2020 (Good Friday) Stephen Parkinson remembers his friend Geoffrey Kirk I first set eyes upon Geoffrey Kirk in 1993 – on May Day, to be precise – in a room hidden in [...]

Many religions have festivals which celebrate light overcoming darkness.      Such occasions are often accompanied by the lighting of candles. They seem to speak to every culture, and appeal to people of all faiths, and of none. They are lit on [...]

Jack Allen on reading more than Thomas Aquinas If you are a Roman Catholic, odds are pretty good that you are a Thomist. Now, since this is New Directions, you’re probably an Anglo-Catholic, in which case odds are still pretty [...]

Simon Morris considers episcopal correspondence Docetism, you may recall, is the heresy that Jesus only appeared to be human but was not substantially so. The Archbishops and Bishops of the Church of England seem to have embraced a new twenty-first [...]