As a child, I was brought up to consider the Royal Family a bunch of rich freeloaders living it up at the expense of us taxpayers – and at the Silver Jubilee in 1977 my revision for my Finals at Oxford was accompanied by the dulcet tones of Johnny Rotten, belting out the Sex Pistols’
The UK launch for my new book, Holy Communion in Contagious Times, took place on 21 January at Southwark Cathedral – and also online in a Zoom meeting (pictured above) – where several people spoke very kindly and generously about the book. A recording of the launch (in four parts) is now available on my
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
