One question, asked in faith, has the power to change a life. I know because it changed mine. It happens when you ask: what is God calling on me to do in these circumstances at this time? To believe in divine providence is to trust that God is interwoven in our lives. This does not [...]
Matthew Parris wrote a moving article in The Times a few weeks ago about the experience of life on welfare benefit. A government minister had been asked whether he could survive on the amount currently being paid to the unemployed. Matthew recalled a week thirty years ago when he had undertaken to do just [...]
Passover, the Jewish festival of freedom we begin celebrating on Monday night, is extraordinary testimony to the power of ritual to keep ideals and identity alive across the centuries. On it we relive the story of our people, sitting together at home as an extended family as if we were back in the Egypt [...]
It is, so the reports say, the first atheist church in Britain. Set in a former church in Islington, hymns include Queen’s “Don’t stop me now” and Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” The altar is surmounted by an image of saintly former pop star turned physics professor, Dr Brian Cox. In place of a sermon there [...]
One of my favourite Jewish sayings is, “Many people worry about their own stomachs and the state of other people’s souls. The real task is to do the opposite: to worry about other people’s stomachs and the state of your own soul.” Or as Rabbi Israel Salanter (1810-1883) used to put it: “Someone else’s [...]
I spend a lot of time with young people: pupils about to leave school, students at university and graduates about to start a career. Often they ask me for advice as they begin their journey into the future. Here are some of the ideas worth thinking about as we begin our journey into a [...]
What I find fascinating about Chanukah, the Jewish festival of lights we celebrate at this time of the year, is the way its story was transformed by time. It began as the simple story of a military victory, the success of Judah the Maccabee and his followers as they fought for religious freedom against [...]
They may not be poetry or deathless prose, but advertising slogans have given us some of the more memorable phrases of our time: “It’s good to talk,” “Just do it,” “Go to work on an egg,” and “Don’t leave home without it.” My personal favourite is the slogan from the early 1970s, “It’s the [...]