Andy Hawes    Purgation   This month begins with All Souls Day and includes Remembrance Sunday. It is a time of the year when the liturgy and prayer of the church meets the reality of physical death with the Gospel [...]

Sarah Gillard-Faulkner, deacon and prison chaplain, looks at how we consider the ravens   My guess is that, for most people, prisons are neither here nor there places. They have no real presence in the world until something very sadly [...]

ST MARGARET, RATLINGHOPE, SHROPSHIRE   Ratlinghope is about as remote as you get in Shropshire, one of England’s most unspoilt counties. The best time to see it is spring; coming from Church Stretton you cross the Long Mynd - very [...]

Arthur Middleton on Reformers, Builders and Caroline Divines: necessary strands of the  Christian life   The seventeenth century was a theological age:   Everybody who thought at all was interested in the subject, and had qualified themselves both by study [...]

William Davage reflects on Remembrance   The generation that went to war in 1914 with an heroic, romantic nonchalance did not envisage the slaughter that they would endure in the mud of Flanders and elsewhere. Their awakening was as swift [...]

Edward Dowler’s personal experience informs his view of Bash Camp bibliology   Andrew Graystone’s eagerly awaited book is, in the words of one survivor, ‘the book that Smyth victims have been longing to see, the story that we have been [...]

Thurifer has been out on the road   My first excursion out of London for eighteen months, I emerged from my enforced hibernation, sniffing the air and blinking, mole like, over the steering wheel. I had not realised that I [...]

Art   Frans Hals:  The Male Portrait Wallace Collection, London until 30th January 2022   This exhibition is shown in two rooms. The first is allowed to take eight people, the second forty-five. If only. This must be the best [...]

Christopher Smith wonders what’s in a name.   The Office of National Statistics has a little toy on its website called ‘Baby names explorer’.  If you have some time to fritter away, it’s quite interesting to chart the popularity of [...]

Unsurprisingly there is much talk in Church of England circles about the results of the recent elections to General Synod. The level of wider interest is open to question but that is for another day. The position on Synod following [...]