Society

Wednesday

Andrew Ziminski

The ancient depictions of the Nativity in England’s churches

For hundreds of years, the 12 days of Christmas have been a significant highlight of the English religious year. In the medieval period, churches in Britain and Ireland were vividly adorned with paintings, stained glass, and sculptures that depicted the Christmas story. Many of these images were destroyed in the Taliban-like wave of destruction that accompanied the English Reformation. But ancient depictions of the Nativity still exist in our churches – as long as you know where to look.  Nativity scenes were uncommon during the early medieval period but they began to be carved into our baptismal fonts from around the 12th century. One of the earliest surviving examples in the UK

Tuesday

Geoff Hill

South Africa dreams of a black Christmas

It’s 38C outside and I’m in a Johannesburg hypermarket owned by the Pick n Pay chain, one of the biggest in South Africa. Despite the heat, their music system has a woman singing ‘Let it snow!’ and songs themed around winter and chestnuts roasting on the fire. In rural areas, the scotch cart is common, a topless buggy pulled by cattle or donkeys, but few here can describe what ‘a one-horse open sleigh’ might look like. Across Pick n Pay and its major competitor known as Checkers, all the Santa props have a light complexion. Not even a black elf. Real holly would wilt in the sun, though it’s grown

Terry Barnes

Australia’s godless Christmas

As Christmas comes around again, we will discover that Australia is no longer a Christian country. According to the most recent census in 2021, Christianity is not a majority faith here and, of its denominations, none has declined more rapidly than Anglicanism – which has lost more than a third of its declared adherents since the turn of this century. Meanwhile, steadily growing non-Christian faiths are headed by Islam, which claimed over 3 per cent of Australians in 2021. Muslims in Australia now outnumber Jews by more than eight to one. Furthermore, the main Anglican and Catholic denominations are more C and E – Christmas and Easter – than C

Angela Epstein

Why this Jew loves Christmas

Merry Christmas – or perhaps, I should say, Season’s Greetings. The festive period can be something of a minefield for the culturally sensitive: even a presumptive or mis-worded greeting, however well meant, may be misconstrued as an affront to diversity and an expression of non-inclusivity. Not least to those who don’t celebrate Christmas, perhaps due to their ethnicity or religion. Being Jewish, this must surely then include me. After all, I don’t sing Christmas carols or believe in the chap with the white beard. So shouldn’t the greatest care be taken when offering greetings of the season or making mention of pigs – pigs! – in blankets? When I make

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Why was C.S. Lewis such a killjoy at Christmas? A discussion with Alister McGrath

27 min listen

Which 20th-century Scrooge had the following to say about the celebration of Christmas?  ‘It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure… Anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It’s almost blackmail… Can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers?’ Step forward C.S. Lewis, beloved Christian apologist and children’s author, whose splenetic denunciation of ‘the whole dreary business’ of Christmas and mean-spirited comments about carol singers are hard to reconcile with his reputation for benevolence. To make sense of the author’s views, Damian Thompson is

Francis Young

How Santa came to recruit his elves

The Christmas elf is so familiar now that it could easily be the first character you think of when you hear the word ‘elf’ – outside of J. R. R. Tolkien’s works, that is.  The very recent Christmas custom of the ‘Elf on the Shelf’ has lately brought elves to particular prominence in the modern British Christmas. But how did Santa Claus – whose origin as a folkloric transmogrification of St Nicholas is well known – acquire elves as helpers, and who are they? The origins of the modern Christmas elf turn out to be both complex and surprising, simultaneously ancient and very modern. In the earliest sources which depict Santa living in Lapland,

Joshua Young

A Christmas Carol is the gift that keeps on giving

It was November 1843, two years after Prince Albert first introduced Britain to the tradition of the Christmas tree. Charles Dickens was 31, and yet to grow his beard. A dire report on child labour the previous year had worked him up into a compassionate rage. Just as pressingly, Dickens needed cash. The author was already famous for The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, but the public was struggling with Martin Chuzzlewit and, to top it off, his wife Catherine was pregnant again. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks, amid explosions of laughter and tears at his desk. He knew straight away it was his best work yet,

Monday

Justin Brierley

The surprising truth about the West’s Christian revival

When weeping Parisians watched Notre Dame, the city’s beloved 800-year-old cathedral, being consumed by a devastating fire in 2019, it served as a sad symbol of the decimation of churchgoing itself in France. Ever since revolutionaries began decapitating priests and nuns in the 1790s, a precipitous decline in Catholic faith has been underway in the country. The ‘Last Supper’ debacle of last summer’s Olympic opening ceremony only served to cement the country’s famously secular reputation. In 2023, the number of people attending Church of England services increased by 5 per cent However, against all odds, the bells of Notre Dame will be ringing out again in time for Christmas Day.

Glynn Harrison

Come all ye unfaithful: why do we still go to carol services at Christmas?

This year, Christmas carol services are expected to draw their largest congregations since the pandemic. As numbers attending carol services swell, one central London church has appealed to its regular congregation to donate 12,000 mince pies to give away. Even in the wake of shocking revelations of religious abuse in recent years, those who rarely engage with faith may still find themselves stepping into cathedrals and parish churches this Christmas season. But why will we go? What are we looking for? Can all this sentimentalised longing really be good for us? The sights and sounds of Christmas stir emotions of altruism and goodwill, of warmth and cosiness, of well-being and

Robin Ashenden

Keir Starmer, the Christmas Grinch

If someone were to read the runes, this first Labour Christmas would not augur well. Not only have we had Keir Starmer’s excruciating ‘illuminations countdown’ in Downing Street – a joyless event if ever there was one – but also the cut-price Christmas Tree in Trafalgar Square – perhaps the mangiest conifer the Norwegians, in their gratitude, have ever been able to dump on us. A Hampshire priest has been savaged for telling children that Santa Claus doesn’t exist and now, we’re informed, Gen Z have declared an outright hostility to turkey and trimmings. Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, a hoohah has sprung up about the

Sunday

James Tidmarsh

The crisis gripping France’s Le Monde newspaper

Once one of France’s most respected publications, Le Monde is in crisis. Its newsroom is gripped by a climate of fear, where only left-wing and woke views are tolerated, and dissenters whisper their frustrations in the shadows. Once a beacon of intellectual rigour and fearless reporting, an investigation by its rival Le Figaro paints a damning picture of a newspaper strangled by ideological conformity and toxic cancel culture. ‘People are afraid; it’s an omerta,’ admits one anonymous journalist. The glory days of Le Monde are gone, replaced by a paper which appears to be more concerned with parroting the ideological consensus than holding power to account.  Le Figaro’s investigation reveals a newsroom

Damian Reilly Damian Reilly

Tyson Fury was robbed in Riyadh

Watching Tyson Fury get robbed last night in Riyadh, I realised on balance that I am in favour of Saudi Arabia’s often ludicrous-seeming recent efforts at sports-washing. Why not? Sure, staging ultra-high profile boxing matches like this in a nation with no boxing heritage whatsoever is obviously a shameless effort at changing negative perceptions, but it’s also an attempt to integrate with the outside world. Ultimately, integration is a good and civilising thing, not least because it means abiding by different, and in this case better, rules. It’s no coincidence, for example, that it became possible at the start of this year to buy booze in the kingdom. Likewise, it

Charles Amos

What my GB News incest row critics fail to understand

The overwhelming response to my defence of incest on GB News has been one of disgust: I’ve been called a pervert thousands of times over. It’s water off a duck’s back to me.  What is extraordinary is the absence of decent arguments against my liberal position. If reproductive and non-reproductive incest are so bad, why do people resort to personal attacks as opposed to moral arguments? There are two reasons: our evolution has predisposed us to viscerally reject incest; and the moral arguments against incest come unstuck because they risk dreadful consequences.  After stonewalling me at dinner last night, my mum gave the same response to the same question I fear that

Druin Burch

Lucy Letby and the killer nurse I worked with

Most of those commenting on the guilt or innocence of Lucy Letby – the nurse who is serving 15 whole-life jail terms for murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others – don’t know what it’s like to work alongside a killer nurse. I do. Benjamin Geen, whom I worked with at Horton General Hospital in Banbury, Oxfordshire, took the lives of at least two patients during his time there. Something in the nature of our interest in murderers has a habit of making us forget logic Geen’s case has, like Letby’s, become popular with conspiracy theorists. Public fascination has been far greater with Letby. But the two cases share an attraction

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

How to save the parish church

Parish churches are in trouble: about fifty churches close every year, according to a report from Civitas. The review, published last month, strongly echoes the case of the Save the Parish campaign: the Church of England’s leadership has failed to support local parishes, diverting funding to more modern-sounding initiatives. About twenty years ago some bright clerical manager types said that the parish is not good at reaching ‘the networks of contemporary life’, so new looser types of church should be set up. The vague assumption was that these would resemble the amorphous evangelical mega-churches like Holy Trinity Brompton. But no new model has really emerged, and traditionalists are understandably disgruntled.

Saturday

Anthony Seldon

Why homeschooling rates have doubled

Schools are a relatively new phenomena in human history. In Britain, they expanded in the 19th century and early 20th century in step with industrialisation and urbanisation, but in many places in the world, what little education the young receive occurs at home. The assumption most share, not unreasonably, is that where there are schools to attend, parents should send their children to them so they can avail themselves of the opportunities for academic learning, for socialisation and working through what they might do after they leave with the rest of their lives.  Covid gave an enormous boost to homeschooling The number of children being home-schooled in the last hundred

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

How the Magdeburg Christmas market attack will change Germany

More than 200 people were injured and at least five lost their lives after a man ploughed a car into crowds at a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg last night. Among those who were indiscriminately murdered was a small child. Like many Germans, I felt a deep, burning anger rising in me when I heard about the incident. It immediately brought back sickening memories of the 2016 Christmas market attack in Berlin in which 13 people were killed and dozens injured. My sister worked very closely nearby that day. I remember texting ‘Are you okay?’ with a shaky hand and waiting agonising minutes before her reply finally

Andrew Watts

Christmas II: Andrews Watts, Marcus Walker, Ali Kefford, Roger Lewis, Ayaan Hirsh Ali and Christopher Howse

48 min listen

On this week’s Christmas Out Loud – part two: Andrew Watts goes to santa school (1:11); Marcus Walker reads his priest’s notebook (7:20); Ali Kefford spends Christmas on patrol with submariners (12:34); Roger Lewis says good riddance to 2024, voiced by the actor Robert Bathurst (20:57); Ayaan Hirsh Ali argues that there is a Christian revival under way (32:41); and Christopher Howse reveals the weirdness behind Christmas carols (38:34).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Kristina Murkett

Labour’s axing of Latin lessons is an act of cultural vandalism

The Labour government seems determined to undermine excellence in schools. The Department for Education has announced that from February it will be terminating its Latin Excellence Programme, which taught Latin to over 5,000 pupils, as part of a cost-saving measure. The cutback comes a month after an external review suggested ‘middle-class bias’ should be removed from the curriculum and that ‘high-brow pursuits’, such as ‘visits to museums, theatres and art galleries’, might be replaced with more ‘relatable’ activities such as graffiti workshops. This retrograde decision is deeply frustrating because it makes the so-called elitism surrounding Latin a self-fulfilling prophecy The decision to effectively end Latin lessons in some state schools is particularly

Christopher Howse

A church service with the Chaldeans of West Acton

I joined the Chaldeans in church on the morning after the night that the rebels in Syria took control of Damascus. We weren’t in Aleppo or on the plains of Nineveh but cocooned in a warm church at West Acton in London, where a community of Christian migrants from Iraq has settled in recent decades. Many came to this country during Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime or after facing persecution from Islamists and militias after the invasion of Iraq. We’re linked here to a misty ancient world in which Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees and the Assyrians came down like a wolf on the fold Outside, rows of bare pollarded lime trees