Rochester Commission I Many thanks to all our members and friends who have made submissions to the Bishop of Rochester’s Commission on Women and the episcopate. Thanks too to those who sent a copy of their submission to us at [...]

Light and Gifts Some years ago, in the Mendip caves, all the lights went out and left us in total darkness. Nobody could pick up any light within that darkness. So it was also an experience of blindness, for darkness [...]

Peace on Earth? George Austin on terrorism As the war in Afghanistan moves to its inevitable conclusion, television news channels bring us instead the horrors of the place we know as the Holy Land, as Israeli and Palestinian seem to [...]

Rodney Schofield considers debt and apology The conference on Racism held in Durban last September attracted much media attention, particularly over the issue of Israel, but also on questions about land reform which certainly touch Malawi and other countries in [...]

Number Crunching Over the last hundred years, the Churches have been in decline in Western Europe. In Ireland the numbers of Catholics attending Mass has been in freefall for many years. In England, the number of church worshippers has declined [...]

SMALL COMMUNITIES IN RELIGIOUS LIFE Catherine Widdicombe Lutterworth, 256pp, pbk 0 7188 3012 1, [£15] The idea of belonging to a small faith community, rather than to a large congregation or institution, attracts many people today. Not all the members [...]

The following is excerpted from a letter to Bishops of Province IV of the Episcopal Church of the United States by retired bishop Fitzsimmons Allison Dear Friends. The long drift of the House of Bishops away from the responsibilities of [...]

‘God's in his heaven, Austin Day's at Christ Church St Laurence, and all's right in the world.’ So it was said for many years by Australian Anglo-Catholics, indicating the crucial role of both Christ Church (set in right in the [...]

Options and Opiates To a clatter of accolades the last great work of Fernand Braudel, the twentieth-century’s greatest historian, was finally published in English in 2001. Les Memoires de la Mediterranée (a title curiously translated as ‘The Mediterranean in the [...]

Arthur Middleton revisits a schoolboy enthusiasm TT Carter (1808–1901) came to the attention of the present author when, as a schoolboy, he was introduced to The Treasury of Devotion that Carter edited. The Preface (1869) states that he was suggesting [...]