Damian Thompson is an associate editor of The Spectator
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This week the Southbank Centre began its ‘Belief and Beyond Belief’ festival — a series of concerts and talks claiming to explore the influence of religious inspiration on music. Last summer, after reading its miserably right-on publicity material, I wrote in this column that ‘Beyond Parody’ might be a better title. Jude Kelly, the Southbank’s
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On 2 January, the Vatican published a letter from Pope Francis to the world’s bishops in which he reminded them that they must show ‘zero tolerance’ towards child abuse. The next day, the American Week magazine published an article that told the story of ‘Don Mercedes’ — Fr Mauro Inzoli, an Italian priest with a
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The bewildering influx of immigrants into London has had one effect that no one could have predicted 20 years ago: it’s making our capital city religious again. We’ve noticed – but only up to a point. Islam is visible: the women in niqabs, the new mosques, the Halal butchers. But the transformation of Christianity in
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The murderers and persecutors of Christians have had a good year. With one exception – the killing of Fr Jacques Hamel in July as he celebrated Mass in a church in Normandy – the world has continued to look away as Islamists and other fanatics have slaughtered followers of Jesus Christ. I don’t mean that we consciously look
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Have you read what the Pope has just said about being sexually turned on by eating faeces? He wasn’t talking about himself, let me quickly add: just human beings in general. They make him sound more like a desperately tasteless stand-up comedian than the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church. I think the media have to be very clear,
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‘Brahms and Liszt’ is a lovely bit of rhyming slang, but it doesn’t have the ring of authenticity. Can you really imagine cockney barrow boys whistling tunes from the Tragic Overture and the Transcendental Études? Also, the Oxford English Dictionary reckons it only dates back to the 1930s. It always made me snigger, though, because
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When Fidel Castro died, Pope Francis ‘grieved’. That’s right: he grieved for the man who – in addition to murdering and torturing his opponents – spent half a century persecuting the Catholic Church in Cuba. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: when Francis visited the island last year, he was gushingly appreciative of the regime’s hospitality
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Here are some statistics you’re unlikely to hear on Thought for the Day. Churchgoers in America backed Trump by 56 to 42 per cent – while six out of ten British Christians backed Brexit. Now, clearly these aren’t identical constituencies: I didn’t spot much enthusiasm for the US president-elect among Christian Leave voters. But we can spot one
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Years ago, when I met a famous concert pianist, I was surprised when he greeted me in a northern accent. A soft one, mind you, but completely intact. I’d assumed that, by the time a conductor or soloist reached a certain level of fame, the northern vowels would have been erased by Received Pronunciation or
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We’re four days away from the presidential election, and America’s evangelical Christian leaders are still supporting a thrice-married man who boasts of grabbing women’s genitals. Meanwhile, it looks as if most Catholics will be voting to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. This grotesque election has split the evangelical-Catholic alliance that claimed the credit
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Nazi-inspired conspiracy theories are gaining popularity among liberal Facebook users who think of themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’. That’s the claim made by the Rev Ravi Holy, a Church of England vicar from Kent, in the new episode of the Spectator’s Holy Smoke religion podcast. He’s alarmed and depressed by the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that his own middle-class friends
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Cristina Odone, former editor of the Catholic Herald, is encouraged to receive Holy Communion in one Kensington parish but not allowed to do so in another. And she says Pope Francis has made her situation worse, by hinting – but only hinting – that Catholics like her, married to a divorced partner, can make up their own minds
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Right-wing Americans see liberal conspiracies everywhere. Often their claims are fatuous — Donald Trump has just announced that the 2016 presidential election has been ‘rigged’ — and sometimes they incorporate poisonous myths about Jewish puppet masters. But liberals, like activists across the spectrum, do occasionally engage in co-ordinated plotting. The question is: what would a
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Are former Muslims who ‘come out’ as atheists in Islamic countries becoming the most persecuted minority in the world? And are Western social media turning a blind eye to their plight? Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist who chairs the anti-extremist Quilliam Foundation, thinks so. He and Douglas Murray, associate editor of the Spectator, join me for the first episode of Holy
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There’s a folder in my computer’s external hard drive in which you’ll find 24 complete recordings of the Bach Cello Suites, 100 recordings of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, 97 of his Sixth, 107 of his Seventh, 65 of Bruckner’s Seventh, 26 of Debussy’s La Mer, 44 Fauré Requiems, 25 Mozart Requiems, 79 Mahler Sixths and 45
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Pope Francis has just given implicit permission for many divorced-and-remarried Catholics to receive Holy Communion. But he’s done so surreptitiously. Effectively, Francis has pulled a fast one on conservative cardinals who didn’t want the rules changed. Very fast, in this case. On 5 September, he received a copy of draft guidelines, written by the bishops of Buenos Aires, on giving
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‘Oh please not more lies from the LibLabCon BLIAR propaganda machine!’ ‘If the author of this article had read the documents of the Council of Chalcedon in the original Greek, then he might not throw around the word “monophysite” with such casual abandon.’ ‘Only one way to stop the Caliphate capturing every village hall in
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‘Can we just stop talking about Hillary Clinton’s health now?’, snapped Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post on September 6. The whole discussion was ‘totally ridiculous’, a smear campaign by conspiracy theorists, and to believe otherwise you had to assume that her doctor was lying. Five days later, and even Cillizza thinks it’s permissible to talk about Clinton’s health, having
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Perhaps because so many of them are former drunks and junkies, ‘addiction experts’ are touchy people. Often they don’t like each other — hardly surprising, since they are fighting each other for such a lucrative business. You can make bigger bucks out of selling ‘recovery’ than by peddling drugs. That’s not to imply moral equivalence,
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On Tuesday morning, an 85-year-old man was forced to his knees while his throat was slit by Islamic fanatics. The murder of Father Jacques Hamel in the church at Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen, has been recognised by western public opinion as an act of unspeakable barbarity. One could say that the facts speak for themselves. But
