Like HG Wells’ hero at the start of his novel, The War of the Worlds, I ‘would not have believed’ that when the little country church I had started going to, for a quiet midweek celebration of holy communion, had to shut its doors, that it would never open them again. It was the opening

Ever since the current Archbishop of Cape Town announced the death of Desmond Tutu early on Boxing Day, the many tributes being paid often begin with words such as activist, campaigner, protester, fighter or opponent. Yet these popular descriptions miss the heart of the person that I knew over more than four decades, someone who insisted on ‘being’ before ‘doing’, contemplation before action, or who said he wanted to be a ‘quietist’ more than an activist.

It’s the 500th anniversary of Ignatius of Loyola being knocked off his feet by a cannonball and being forced to lie down with his legs up, taking stock of his life, over the summer months of 1521. Check out the video below for an introduction to this Ignatian year. Because the cannonball moment was what