SS PETER AND PAUL, FRESSINGFIELD, SUFFOLK   As you approach from the south, Fressingfield church looks like a wholly 15th c. building, and it is only when you take a closer look at the tower that you realise that’s about [...]

Keeping Faith   Andy Hawes    Advent is a time of exhortation and urgency: keep awake, be ready! One resounding question rings out: ‘When the Son of Man comes will he find faith on earth?’ The Lord’s question is a [...]

Arthur Middleton on the desire for God   Starting with the familiar in George Herbert reminds one that Anglicanism has always had priests who were poets and poets who were priests, but in Herbert these become two sides of a [...]

Stephen Wilson delivers a ‘meta-sermon’   ‘If I had one sermon to preach’… what would it be? The theme chosen for this term’s sermons at Evensong prompted a memory of a meeting with that most charismatic of Christian leaders, Archbishop [...]

John Gayford explores the popularity of the martyred archbishop   At about 4.30pm on Tuesday 29th December 1170, Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered by four knights in his own cathedral at the end of monastic Vespers. Rather confusingly [...]

Thurifer goes shopping   Christmas presents for my parents were easy. My father liked to have the latest cologne or after-shave. He had a tendency to the modern in furniture and cars, as well as grooming. My mother was less [...]

Art   Gauguin Portraits National Gallery  until 20th January, 2020    This exhibition is much smaller than the comprehensive Gauguin-fest at Tate Modern in 2010–11. It has a number of the same paintings and far fewer great works. But it [...]

What is it that guides and motivates our parishes? What is it that focuses our energies and corporate life as a movement? In one sense the answer to these questions is easy: Jesus Christ and the proclamation of the Gospel. [...]

Tom Sutcliffe hits the streets   I have been struggling with letterboxes in Streatham. In the run-up to Christmas and Easter, St Peter’s, Streatham (which is my church—though we are a few yards outside the parish boundary) has every year [...]

Christopher Smith reflects on the importance of motherhood   Between last month’s column and this, I have had surgery to replace my painful, arthritic left hip with something more useful made of titanium.  Having got to my fifties without ever [...]