Home ›

Culture and Review

  • 18 Oct 2007
    Making sense of religion in America

    Those hoping that when George W. Bush departs the Oval Office, religion will accompany him are likely to be disappointed, says Jonathan Bartley, if a book by the former Guardian religious affairs correspondent is right.

  • 17 Oct 2007
    A Moral Climate - the ethics of global warming

    Jo Rathbone assesses a new book which is an excavation of the foundations of the modern global economy, a case for environmental sustainability, and a theological and biblical case for a different way of living.

  • 17 Oct 2007
    The church outs itself on homosexuality

    The outing of Vatican high-flier Monsignor Tommaso Stenico in a secretly filmed TV sting offers a real insight into the struggle the Roman Catholic Church is having in its home country over homosexuality.

  • 19 Sep 2007
    Why Christians should take Richard Dawkins seriously

    Though the god Richard Dawkins seeks to demolish is a caricature and often based on ill-informed analysis, says Richard Skinner, it is uncomfortably close to the idol some Christians have chosen to worship.

  • 7 Sep 2007
    Finding faith in the deathly hallows

    The Harry Potter books, says Steve Fouch, are full of values that Christian and atheist and agnostic alike would recognise – because friends matter, truth is vital, and evil is always weaker than good.

  • 24 Aug 2007
    An unsettling Gospel – Rowan Williams on Jesus' trial

    Alison Goodlad revisits a book which is fast becoming a Christian classic and discovers that the most famous trial in history is as much about the incapacity of a world like the one we have constructed to comprehend the love of God, as it is about why Jesus stands before Pilate.

  • 13 Aug 2007
    Rethinking Christianity - by Keith Ward

    In an era where a basic understanding of what Christianity is about cannot be taken for granted, Simon Barrow welcomes a new book by philosopher and theologian Keith Ward which clears some ground and opens up issues.

  • 30 Jul 2007
    Reading Harry Potter too religiously

    Religiously constructed rows over sorcery, metaphor and meaning in Harry Potter are hardly new, as Simon Barrow has personal reason to know. He suggests we all chill out and finding meaning not menace in the narrative.

  • 14 Jul 2007
    How Islam can challenge those who abuse it from within

    An easy assumption that religion is less dangerous when it is 'less religious' is wrong, says Simon Barrow. As an article in the International Herald Tribune points out, the path from death to life is found within as well as beyond each tradition.

  • 24 Jun 2007
    Finding at-one-ment in Middlemarch

    Alison Goodlad re-reads George Eliot’s classic ‘Middlemarch’ – and discovers that its provincial narrative has some powerful things to tell us about loving purpose in life, atonement and even Eucharistic living.

  • 14 Jun 2007
    Manchester Cathedral mounts its charger

    What is really at stake in the row between Sony and Manchester Cathedral over a violent video game? Simon Barrow looks at it in terms of Christendom, 'redemptive violence', image as commodity and the onset of the hyperreal.

  • 9 Jun 2007
    Buying books helps to fund the quest for peace with justice
  • 27 Apr 2007
    Losing our (radio) religion?

    Simon Barrow suggests that how the churches see their engagement with culture, including spaces like the BBC's Thought for The Day, is shaped by the question about how God has been turned into an artefact under Christendom.

  • 22 Apr 2007
    Why St George is no crusader

    Far from being a crusader, St George of Lydda was a defender of the powerless, says Garth Hewitt. He is a figure for Muslims, Jews, Christians - and for the church in Palestine.

  • 16 Apr 2007
    Muslims, Christians and the global human challenge

    Simon Barrow gives an overview of three scholarly contributions by Kenneth Cragg, perhaps the world's leading interpreter of the relations between the Semitic faiths and their encounters with Western culture.