ST LAURENCE, LUDLOW, SALOP It's the tower that does it. The gateway to the Western Marches, Ludlow was an important frontier town, complete with castle, and your first sight of it from afar is drawn to the great mid-fifteenth-century central [...]

Tom Sutcliffe has had better nights at the theatre Alistair McDowall's play X, at the Royal Court, was supposed to be science fiction. The publicity went on about it taking place at a research base on Pluto that seemed to have [...]

WITHOUT PRECEDENT: SCRIPTURE, TRADITION AND THE ORDINATION OF WOMEN Geoffrey Kirk Wipf & Stock (Oregon, USA) 2016 Pbk 162pp, 978-1-4982-3081-0   That Geoffrey Kirk has written a sharp, lucid, and closely argued book that is unafraid to expose nonsense and [...]

Christopher Smith marvels at the transforming power of self-identification I have had mice in the vicarage. This hardly surprised me in central London, where it is commonly held that you are never more than three yards away from a rat; but, [...]

Arthur Middleton Thoughts from Charles Gore Our Lord concludes the Sermon on the Mount with three emphatic and striking warnings. We may describe them as the Two Ways in life; the easy way of self-pleasing and the hard way of self-denial. [...]

Arthur Middleton on Pastoral Ministry The context of priests and pastors must always be ecclesial rather than secular, and rooted in a living relationship to Christian revelation: Baptism, the Eucharist, the ministry of Word and Sacrament, and the grace of orders [...]

Beyond Words Andy Hawes is Warden of Edenham Regional Retreat House The experience of spiritual direction assumes one very important thing: that the person seeking counsel can explain something of their spiritual life in such a way that the person from [...]

Our chef combats heresy with hollandaise Last month, lamb; this month, eggs. It's all seasonally symbolic, you see – and no hint of a butchered and butterflied Easter Bunny anywhere. I find that there's very little that can’t be improved [...]

Thurifer’ finds himself in a commemorative mood Grave matters Those who share my interest in wandering around cemeteries, locating graves of the famous and infamous, and savouring funerary monuments would appreciate the tour of the West Cemetery of Highgate Cemetery. The [...]

Allan Barton on some medieval titles of Our Lady This woodcut image is taken from a Missal printed in 1555. It is a Missal according to the Use of Sarum, and – like many liturgical books of the sixteenth century destined [...]