Religion

If you look to our schools and universities, you will not see a serious engagement with the Bible as part of the study of politics, of philosophy, or even of literature and culture more generally, despite the huge influence of Biblical ideas on the development of British, American and European politics – and so also across the Commonwealth and the world. University courses on political philosophy take a fundamentally ahistorical position of focusing on purely secular philosophers, rather than facing the reality of the Bible’s impact on the actual development of modern politics.  From Bristol to Warwick to Glasgow, the works of Hobbes and Rousseau, Mill and Rawls, are compulsory

In the week before Orthodox Lent began, some 233 Russian Orthodox priests published a petition calling for peace. The signatories spoke of the ‘fratricidal war in Ukraine’, with a call for an immediate ceasefire, and deplored ‘the trial that our brothers and sisters in Ukraine were undeservedly subjected to’. Anyone who knows how authority is exercised in the Russian Orthodox church, and how closely it has allied itself with Putin’s authoritarian state, will recognise the clerics’ courage. But what effect is it likely to have on the attitude of the highest authorities in the church? To answer these questions, we need to understand not only the centuries-old link between political

One small, deadly incident in the Ukrainian war proved memorable because it involved the ordinary things of life. A mother and two children trying to leave the town of Irpin on foot on 6 March died from Russian shelling. Their suitcases fell beside them and, miserably, a pet dog carrier. They lay on an ordinary road that could be in Surrey, on the steps of a memorial to Soviet dead from the second world war. That spot is opposite a little row of bells under a tiled roof in the grounds of the Ukrainian Orthodox church of St George. A neat hoarding was visible in 2015 on the building next

Until very recently, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, was most famous for being the owner of a phantom wristwatch. It had the magical property of disappearing from sight, visible to onlookers only as a reflection. Don’t believe me? Google ‘Kirill’ and ‘watch’ and you’ll find a photo of the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’ meeting the Russian justice minister. It was taken in 2009, the year Kirill succeeded the late Patriarch Alexy II as spiritual leader of 110 million Russian Orthodox Christians. On his head Kirill is wearing a white koukoulion, the so-called ‘helmet of salvation’, with side flaps like the ears of a

Reactions to the recent passing of F.W. de Klerk transported me back to my childhood in South Africa. The horror of apartheid was a frequent topic of conversation in our family. My uncle’s law firm, Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman, pioneered the employment of black people and gave Nelson Mandela his first job as a clerk, in defiance of the accepted practice at the time. My mother was the principal of the only training college for black pre-school teachers and my father, a rabbi, made pastoral visits to Robben Island. We were all-too-aware of the urgent need to dismantle the structural racism that plagued the country. When de Klerk and Mandela