Justin welby

Mitres off to the Archbishop of Canterbury for inviting ‘a family or two’ of refugees into his home. Well, not specifically into his home but into a four-bedroom cottage that sits in the grounds of Lambeth Palace. Opening up your second home to refugees is becoming quite fashionable among people who have more houses than they have hats or, indeed, mitres. Bob Geldof has offered refugees use of his Kent home as well as his London flat. The Pope has instructed that Vatican lodgings should be made available to a few families. This refugee crisis is proving easier to solve than we first thought. By my quick calculation, that’s possibly up

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/workingwithal-qa-eda/media.mp3″ title=”Mark Greaves discusses the Church of England’s plans for growth” startat=1513] Listen [/audioplayer]A new mood has taken hold of Lambeth Palace. Officials call it urgency; critics say it is panic. The Church of England, the thinking goes, is about to shrink rapidly, even vanish in some areas, unless urgent action is taken. This action, laid out in a flurry of high-level reports, amounts to the biggest institutional shake-up since the 1990s. Red tape is to be cut, processes streamlined, resources optimised. Targets have been set. The Church is ill — and business management is going to cure it. Reformers say they are only removing obstacles that hinder the

After Islamist terrorist atrocities, political leaders often rush to say that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam. One can understand why they feel the need to do this but the problem is the terrorists clearly do think, however mistakenly, that they are acting in the name of Islam. But if any politician wants to know how to answer the question about the link between terrorism and Islam, they should look at these answers from the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby in an interview with The New York Times: There are aspects of Islamic practice and tradition at the moment that involve them in violence, as there are, incidentally,

Were you aware that the famous actor Andy Garcia was born with a foetus growing out of his left shoulder? It was removed from him when he was a toddler. I had not known this and I am unhappy that some sort of conspiracy, some wall of silence, was constructed to keep this news from the paying public. I watched The Untouchables in blissful ignorance of the fact; had I known I would have picketed the cinema. Come clean about the dead foetus, Garcia! I am aware of the foetus business now only because I stumbled across an excellent website entitled ‘25 Celebrities With Hideous Physical Deformities’, and Garcia was

It has been quite difficult for anyone following the growth food banks over the past few years to avoid growing dispirited. The debate in Parliament runs along the lines of the Tories pretending food banks and food bank demand don’t exist and Labour claiming that food banks and rising food bank demands are all the Tories’ fault. This makes for the unedifying spectacle of both parties throwing mud at one another about people going hungry in this country without appearing to make any progress on addressing the many different factors driving families to food banks. This morning’s report, Feeding Britain, from the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Hunger in the United

We at 22 Old Queen Street have never been great fans of Rowan Williams. At a time when strong ecclesiastical leadership was needs he served up abstract, pew-emptying waffle. But as this week’s leading article in the magazine argues, his successor Justin Welby has taken a more subtle, serious and successful approach — which bears fruit, as we saw last week with the government’s crackdown on the most sharkish of the payday lenders. ‘Welby’s intelligence on financial matters stands in direct contrast with that of his predecessor, Rowan Williams, whose pronouncements on current affairs so often came across as those of a lofty professor who had found himself in the wrong lecture hall. Straying

For decades, interventions of the Archbishop of Canterbury in national debate were like a sporadic bombardment of small pebbles against the door of Downing Street. Justin Welby has changed all that. This week, payday loan companies are facing reform (or in some cases oblivion) as new caps on interest payments come into effect. That the industry finds itself in this position is thanks, in no small part, to it having been hooked around the neck by the Archbishop’s crosier. Welby has inspired reform of the industry not by trying to set himself up as the leader of the opposition in a cassock, but by acting as an effective leader of

When Justin Welby spoke to the Parliamentary press gallery today, he took great care to emphasise a number of points. One was about the influence the Church of England has in public debate, and the other was about the church’s influence in local communities and the strength of its connections in those communities. He didn’t give the impression initially that he didn’t want to intervene in the public debate about immigration when asked about it, but then couldn’t resist commenting anyway. He told journalists that he was worried about the language in the debate, and that local churches were seeing a rise in racism, which he seemed to think was

October is always a turbulent month, and I’m feeling uneasy about this one. The FTSE100 index, which looked set to break through 7,000 in September, has lost more than 500 points since then — and would have lost more but for manoeuvres in the mining sector. Pessimism stalks the bond markets, and even a falling oil price is read more as a harbinger of faltering growth than a stimulus for further recovery. Ebola is the new volcanic ash cloud, and attention is focused on the apparently incorrigible weakness of the eurozone — where the biggest problem is what was long seen as the most potent solution, namely the German economy.

How amazing to have two former Anglican archbishops, George Carey of Canterbury and Desmond Tutu of South Africa, supporting Lord Falconer’s bill to legalise assisted suicide! It has always been, and remains, a firm doctrine of the Church of England that it is wrong to take a life. Yet here are two Church leaders agreeing with a majority of Britons — more than 80 per cent, according to the polls — that it should be legal for a doctor to supply a suffering, terminally ill patient with a lethal dose of poison if he wants it. Lord Carey said that in changing his mind on this issue he had been

There was something poignant about the decision of L’Wren Scott, Mick Jagger’s American girlfriend, who committed suicide in New York last month, to leave everything she had to him in her will. Maybe it was out of gratitude for his help in keeping her foundering fashion business afloat; or maybe it was just a mark of her devotion to the man she referred to in the will as ‘my Michael Philip Jagger’. But whatever her motive, it was a decision very much against the spirit of the times, one that will further widen the gap between rich and poor by adding property worth £5.5 million to Jagger’s already estimated personal

Thirty years ago this Saturday, I became editor of this magazine. In the same month, the miners’ strike began, Anthony Wedgwood Benn (as the right-wing press still insisted on calling him) won the Chesterfield by-election, the FT index rose above 900 for the first time and the mortgage rate fell to 10.5 per cent. Mark Thatcher was reported to be leaving the country to sell Lotus cars in America for £45,000 a year. Although she now tells me she has no memory of it, Wendy Cope wrote a poem entitled ‘The Editor of The Spectator is 27 Years Old’. Because I was young, the events are vivid in my mind,

Wouldn’t it be boring if everyone behaved much as you behave? If everyone expressed themselves similarly? Let a thousand flowers bloom, I say. Take the case of Torz Reynolds. You are almost certainly not called Torz and I would guess, too, that you count few people within your circle of friends who abide under that name. I don’t know where it comes from, Torz. A shortening of Victoria, I would guess, although it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that she was actually christened Torz, much as people these days are christened Jayden. Anyway, that’s not the point. Torz, who is 26 and lives in London, decided that she